Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 863

This week, Google announced a $1 billion investment in housing across the San Francisco Bay Area. Here is the blog post announcement by CEO, Sundar Pichai. And here are a couple of paragraphs from the post explaining how this is expected to work:

First, over the next 10 years, we’ll repurpose at least $750 million of Google’s land, most of which is currently zoned for office or commercial space, as residential housing. This will enable us to support the development of at least 15,000 new homes at all income levels in the Bay Area, including housing options for middle and low-income families. (By way of comparison, 3,000 total homes were built in the South Bay in 2018). We hope this plays a role in addressing the chronic shortage of affordable housing options for long-time middle and low income residents.

Second, we’ll establish a $250 million investment fund so that we can provide incentives to enable developers to build at least 5,000 affordable housing units across the market.

In addition to the increased supply of affordable housing these investments will help create, we will give $50 million in grants through Google.org to nonprofits focused on the issues of homelessness and displacement. This builds on the $18 million in grants we’ve given to help address homelessness over the last five years, including $3 million we gave to the newly opened  SF Navigation Center  and $1.5 million to  affordable housing  for low income veterans and households in Mountain View.

Google is not alone in its efforts to improve housing supply in the Bay Area but, according to CityLab , this is "the single largest commitment by a private employer."

There's a lot of debate about the value of housing supply, alone. But in 2017, the Bay Area added 3.5x as many jobs as it did housing . I think most people would agree that's a suboptimal, and potentially unsustainable, mismatch.

Also, if large companies such as Google and Microsoft are making these sorts of investments, it is likely that they're worried about housing unaffordability impacting their ability to attract and retain top talent going forward.

Perhaps this is a signal for just how unsustainable this mismatch has gotten.

A new Facebook-supported blockchain and cryptocurrency, called Libra , was announced today. The goal: a new global currency. But unlike other cryptocurrencies, this one will be backed by a basket of government-issued securities and other investments.

A new governing body called the Libra Association has also been formed, with its 28 founding members (see above image) contributing both capital (at least $10 million) and expertise. Going forward, they will help shape the network. It's important to note that Facebook will have the same status as all other members of the Association.

Here's an excerpt from today's WSJ :

Facebook said Tuesday the network underpinning the new cryptocurrency would be governed by the Libra Association, an independent, not-for-profit organization based in Geneva. Facebook named more than two-dozen founding partners in that association, including Uber, Visa Inc. and a handful of venture-capital firms and blockchain companies like Coinbase.

The other thing that differentiates Libra from other cryptocurrencies is that when it launches next year (2020), it will do so inside some of the most widely used consumer apps on the internet, including Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. That translates into somewhere around 2.4 billion active users.

Many within in the industry are already speculating that this could be what finally brings the crypto ecosystem into the mainstream, which is, I guess, why companies such as Visa and Mastercard have already signed on to the project. I am also thrilled to see the Creative Destruction Lab listed above. They are a seed-stage program based out of the University of Toronto.

If you'd like to learn more about Libra, here's the official website and here's a good solid overview by TechCrunch.

Image: Libra

Today was a historic day for Toronto, for Canada, and for the game of basketball in this country. The Toronto Raptors are world champions for the first time since their founding in 1995. Soak it in. Here is a photo that I took of the parade coming through the Financial District at around 2:30pm:

Some of the estimates going around are that 1 to 2 million people attended today's championship parade. But 2 million seems like a lot, even though today was frenetic (see above photo, again). I mean, that's 1/3 of the population of the Greater Toronto Area.

The fact that some of the "official" estimates also have a 1 million person spread tells me that, as of right now, we actually have no idea how many people were at today's parade.

So that got me thinking: How do people count crowds? And are we using drones to do it, yet? Subway and rail ridership for the day -- which surely spiked -- will give us some indication. But definitely not the full picture.

It turns out that the typical approach to counting crowds is known as Jacobs' Method . It was invented in the 1960s by a professor at UC, Berkeley, named Herbert Jacobs. He came up with the method while trying to count the number of students protesting the Vietnam War.

The concept is simple: It's area x density. And permutations of his method usually use this same principle. What you do is take the area filled with people, break it up into a smaller grid, and then come up with a population density estimate for each square.

He had some rules of thumb for that. A light crowd was about 1 person per 10 square feet. And a dense crowd (such as a mosh pit or an NBA championship parade in Toronto) was about 1 person per 2.5 square feet.

Using this method and aerial photos of today's parade, I would imagine that we could eventually get to a more precise estimate than 1 to 2 million people. But surely somebody has figured out how to program a drone (or other UAV) and do this even more accurately.

Crowd data is valuable information, particularly for political rallies and protests (I would imagine). If you know of a company doing this, please leave it in the comment section below. And if it doesn't yet exist, well then, now you have a new business idea.