Friday News Digest
As Chuck and the rest of the Marohn clan continue to explore the Rockies, I've been asked to feed the fish, watch the dogs, and make sure the house doesn't burn down. Check. Check............and Check. We'll be back to regular programming starting on Monday. Here is an abbreviated verison of this week's news, enjoy!
- First off, congratulations to our friend, long-time supporter, and CNU21 roommate Matt Steele on announcing his candidacy for the Minneapolis City Council. Best of luck Matt, we’re pulling for you.
- In what I consider to be the biggest (at least biggest/happiest) news of the week, the Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977 has left the solar system (presumably). I find it intriguing that something sent into space 36 years ago is not only still functional, but able to send data back to Earth from 11 billion miles away. Amazing.
NASA's Voyager 1 has traveled farther from Earth than any other human-made object. And now, these researchers say, it has begun the first exploration of our galaxy beyond the Sun's influence.
- This week Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, announced plans for an alternative to high speed rail. He has named it “Hyperloop” and it is essentially an elevated tube that sends pods containing people back and forth up to 900 hundred miles. Musk suspects that distances traveled over that inflection point would be better served by supersonic air travel.
Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment. This is where things get tricky.
- The Boomers are coming! The Boomers are coming!
Hip urban neighborhoods are aging, as a growing chunk of adults in their 50s and 60s and older give up their longtime homes and head for trendy condos. The invasion of older, moneyed buyers has "created a gold rush" in some of these areas, says Dean Jones of Realogics Sotheby's International Realty in Seattle.
- And if you haven’t figured it out yet, the Boomers (and others) have to be coming from somewhere. Leigh Gallager of Fortune magazine recently wrote a book on this phenomenon. The second chapter focuses on some guy from Brainerd, Minnesota. I suggest you check it out.
We blew up the suburban model. We created urban sprawl, which spread people further and further apart — further away from their jobs and into communities that weren’t designed to meet their needs. Today the suburbs aren’t delivering for a lot of people.
- Sticking with “The Great Suburban Migration” theme: we’ve all heard the term “walkable” when describing a place but now, “crawlable?” Makes sense to me.
As Vancouver planner Brent Toderian wrote recently (and others have said before), “Kids are the indicator species of a great neighborhood.” Cities — even downtowns — aren’t just for singles and seniors. Toderian says in Vancouver, they got developers to build and sometimes even operate daycares and schools as part of “density negotiations.” And cities across North America are following suit, focusing on attracting families with kids downtown.
- And lastly, our friend Steve Mouzon of The Original Green gave a fascinating presentation with Clay Chapman of Hope for Architecture at CNU21 in Salt Lake City. We recorded the presentation on a handheld so the audio is not the best but it is definitley worth a watch.
The end of summer is near, enjoy your weekend everyone.