Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 714

It has been well documented that Tokyo tends to build a lot of housing. And the argument goes that this has helped to maintain a certain level of housing affordability. The city is constantly building and rebuilding. It also has different views about housing . Now, we could, of course, debate how much of its relative affordability is a direct result of supply but, regardless, there seems to be a lot of it. In 2014, the city of Tokyo saw 142,417 housing starts, according to this recent FT article . This is compared to ~5,000 units across the Bay Area ( 2015 data ), 83,657 units for the state of California, and 137,010 units for all of England.

If you're wondering how Toronto is doing, here are the latest numbers:

https://twitter.com/GreggLintern/status/1306614244650164226?s=20

This week it was announced that Social Capital Hedosophia II -- a special purpose acquisition company associated with Chamath Palihapitiya -- will merge with the real estate startup Opendoor, effectively taking the company public. Without going into all of the details, SPACs are kind of popular right now. They're a way to take companies public without going through the traditional IPO process. And Chamath is clearly a believer in the approach, as he has gone ahead and reserved all of the symbols from "IPOA" to "IPOZ" on the New York Stock Exchange. $IPOB is what will be merging with Opendoor.

But SPACs are not the point of this post. The point is that I have written a lot about Opendoor over the years on this blog. ( Here are those post .) And I'm pretty sure that, on a number of occasions, I have referred to it as one of if not the most promising consumer-facing real estate startup. So in my view this announcement is a pretty big deal for both the company and for the industry. As Chamath puts it in the below investment thesis, "real estate is the largest, undisrupted form of buying/selling in the US worth more than $1.6 trillion annually." And it's only a matter of time before that process moves online.

https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1305837931710480387?s=20

Last week, Uber made this green announcement .

In it, they committed to becoming a "zero-emission platform" by 2040, with 100% of rides taking place in zero-emission vehicles, on public transit, or with micromobility. In the US, Canada, and Europe, they have gone even further and committed to 100% of rides taking place in an electric vehicle by 2030. And at the corporate level, they are similarly targeting net-zero emissions by 2030.

To achieve all of this, the company will be focusing on helping drivers transition to EVs by 2025, investing in their multimodal network, and trying to encourage less reliance on personal car ownership, among other things. They'll also be incentivizing both drivers (+$1.50 per Green ride) and consumers (3x Uber Rewards points per Green ride, instead of 2x). And I think these will be key.

According to Uber, global carbon emissions fell by some 17% in the month of April as a result of lockdowns. But by June that decline had diminished to only 5%. What is obvious is that this was a short-term blip. "Normal" will return at some point. But once on-demand mobility is able to fully transition to electric vehicles, we'll certainly be looking at a different kind of normal.

For the full news release, click here .

Full disclosure: I am long Uber.