Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 938

Proposition C will be on San Francisco’s ballots this November 6th, 2018. 

If approved by voters, the following additional taxes would be levied on businesses in order to create a dedicated fund to both support and prevent homelessness in the city:

For businesses that pay a gross receipts tax, an additional tax of 0.175 percent to 0.690 percent on those gross revenues in San Francisco over $50 million;

For businesses that pay the administrative office tax, an additional tax of 1.5 percent of their payroll expense in San Francisco.

Marc Benioff – the founder of Salesforce (which happens to be the city’s largest employer) – has emerged as the lead supporter of Prop C. Between personal and corporate funds, he has contributed almost $8 million to getting this passed.

But other billionaires in the Bay Area, such as Jack Dorsey of Twitter, have taken a different position, instead siding with Mayor London Breed , who does not support Prop C. 

If you’re interested in this topic, the New Yorker has a piece called, The Battle of the Big-Tech Titans Over San Francisco’s Tax for the Homeless

For those of you who aren’t going to be in Toronto next week, you can stop reading now and check back tomorrow. For the rest of you, next week is The Future Cities Canada Summit , which will be taking place from November 7 - 9. Full schedule, here .

Day 1 equals the Urban Land Institute Symposium 2018 , which is all about Toronto urbanism. The tagline is: “Explore the urban frontiers of North America’s fastest growing, and the world’s most diverse city-region.” 

A big part of day 1 will be bus tours around the city. And one of those tours is going to be focused on Toronto’s laneways. I am a speaker on that tour and the bus will be stopping at Junction House to talk about the laneway houses that we plan to release as part of the project.

But there’s much more to this summit than just laneway housing.

Earlier this month, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and the Partnership for New York City launched a new vertical accelerator dedicated to public transit. The mission is to make the city a global leader in this space.

Applications are open until November 30, 2018 and they are looking for early and growth stage companies that address one or both of the following challenges:

1. How can we better predict subway incident impacts and serve customers?
   

2. How can we make buses faster and more efficient?
   

Selected companies will go through an 8-week accelerator and, at the end of it, the most promising companies will partner with the MTA on a 12-month pilot. So it is an opportunity to potentially test your product(s) on the largest transit authority in the US.

If you’d like to apply, you can do that here .

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash