Small Cities Weekly | 12.29.2023
End of Year Feedback, Bus Stops, & Tech Talent
As part of the work we are doing on the Small City Segment, we send out a brief weekly post of thoughts, links, and research in progress that reflect the week’s work. I’d love to hear from you if you have any thoughts, questions, disagreements, or things to add. Please forward this on to people you think might enjoy reading it.
24th Edition
This is the 24th edition of Small Cities Weekly. Every Friday for 24 weeks now, I’ve sent out a few thoughts and a few links that come up as I spend my time developing a thesis around the Small City Segment.
This time of year is an obvious one to reflect on the work done and the work to do. As I make my way through that process and prepare to share more about what I’ve learned and where I hope to go next, it would mean a lot to me to hear from you all.
Feedback is the biggest gift I’ve received from this writing practice thus far and I’d be grateful for any more you’d be willing to give. Feel free to comment below or email me at dustin@invanti.co. Even the shortest of notes are helpful.
Wishing you a happy holiday season -
Dustin
Links
Bus Stations Across America Are Closing, David Harrison, WSJ
Intercity bus travel isn’t federally regulated and attracts less attention and public funding than passenger rail or air travel. Nonetheless, it plays a vital role for passengers who need cheap transportation or who are traveling to places with no air or train service.
A 2016 DePaul University study put the number of bus riders at around 62 million a year, roughly twice that of Amtrak. Greyhound, the country’s largest operator, carried about a third of those.
Tech Hubs Are Losing the Talent War to Everywhere Else, Christopher Mims, WSJ
Certain kinds of innovation will continue to be concentrated in the places where that type of tech is the primary business of many companies and workers, such as AI in the Bay Area and biotechnology in Boston.
But the nature of tech jobs is shifting from radical innovation to the kinds of “new collar” jobs that require people who can implement those technologies. This will likely bolster the trend of new tech jobs becoming more plentiful in cities where this wasn’t previously the case—and shrinking the workforces in what were once America’s tech hubs.
Simply Homes nabs $22M, leverages AI to tackle affordable housing crisis, Mary Ann Azevedo, TechCrunch
One Portland, Maine-based startup is out to help address the problem by buying single-family homes in blighted neighborhoods, renovating them and then renting them out to very low-income families, the elderly and the disabled (or Section-8 voucher holders). That startup, Simply Homes, has recently secured $22 million in funding to further its efforts.
…
Indeed, most iBuyers are focused on buying, renovating and either selling or renting homes in middle to upper class neighborhoods. And most home builders are “out of touch and building homes that no one who needs affordable housing could ever afford,” Bagdasarian told TechCrunch in an interview.
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