Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 619

This is an interesting study by Clio Andries (assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology) and Xiaofan Laing (city planning graduate student). It looks at restaurant “chaininess” across the United States.

To do this, they mapped over 800,000 restaurants and looked for, among other things, restaurants with the same name. If the same restaurant name shows up in multiple locations, it is considered to be a chain.

Looking at the above snapshot of San Francisco, a yellow dot represents what is thought to be an independent restaurant and a dark purple/maroon dot represents a chain.

San Francisco has a very high percentage of independent restaurants. In their study, the city receives a chainess score of 28, compared to the national average of 1,247. (Some cities in the southeastern US are in the 1,900s).

One of the interesting takeaways from this study is that there appears to be a correlation between chaininess and built form. Generally speaking, the study revealed that auto-centric communities tend to have more chain restaurants, versus more independent restaurants in pedestrian-centric communities.

This is perhaps intuitive if you’ve ever driven and traveled across the US, but it is interesting to consider what is actually leading to this food and beverage outcome. Density certainly plays a role.

Monroe County, Florida, which is the county that includes the Florida Keys, held a public meeting at the end of last month to discuss what they are going to do to respond to climate change. The agenda can be found over here . According to this article in Grist , it was a seven-hour public meeting and the overall tone was something along the lines of this:

“The water is coming and we can’t stop it,” said Michelle Coldiron, mayor of Monroe County, which encompasses the Keys. “Some homes will have to be elevated, some will have to be bought out. It’s very difficult to have these conversations with homeowners, because this is where they live. It can get very emotional.”

In attendance at the public meeting was a scientist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who outlined that they are expecting an additional 17 inches of sea level rise by 2040. This is the "intermediate high" scenario based on the below chart.

Which is why the county is looking to spend $1.8 billion over the next 25 years to raise some 150 miles of roads and deploy a bunch of other fixes that include things like new drains, pumping stations, and vegetation -- all of which are of course intended to mitigate the impacts of sea level rise.

One problem, which shouldn't be all that surprising, is that the county doesn't have the money to pay for all of this. And as the quote at the beginning of this post suggests, part of "this" includes buying out many of the homes. Presumably these are the higher risk homes where there are no clear alternatives.

This is a problematic situation. Because as time goes on, one would expect the tax base here to start to decreasing. Both as homes get bought out and as overall housing demand weakens. There are also financing and insurance considerations. Already the Keys have some of if not the highest insurance premiums in Florida.

As I understand it, the Florida Keys are one of the most vulnerable areas in North America when it comes to sea level rise. And so unfortunately, the public meeting that took place two weeks ago could very well be considered a leading indicator for what's to come.

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has just launched a new site called Future. It is a site for "understanding the future, how tech shapes it, and how we build it." I just subscribed to it and, if you'd like to do the same, click here . At the same time, the company also just announced their latest crypto fund (a $2.2 billion fund). Here's an excerpt from the release :

We believe that the next wave of computing innovation will be driven by crypto. We are radically optimistic about crypto’s potential to restore trust and enable new kinds of governance where communities collectively make important decisions about how networks evolve, what behaviors are permitted, and how economic benefits are distributed. 

I've been reading a lot more about crypto over the last few months (which is something that I mentioned I was doing here .) I am not in this world day-to-day, but I am now fully convinced that we are in the very early innings of a profound shift. So pretty soon this is going to become my day-to-day, whether I like it or not.