Reading List 01/18/25
Real estate reading, homes that survived the LA fires, space startups, maps of agricultural suitability, hail incidence, and more.
Welcome to this week’s reading list, a roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week includes recommended books about real estate development, which homes survived the LA fires, space startups, maps of agricultural suitability, hail incidence, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
Real estate development recommended reading
This week’s newsletter was about the key role developers play in skyscraper aesthetics. If you’re interested in reading more about real estate development, here are three great books I recommend.
High Rise by Jerry Adler — This is the exact sort of book I love, narrative-ish nonfiction written by a journalist who nails both the prose and the factual details. High Rise tells the story of the construction of 1540 Broadway, mostly from the perspective of the developer Bruce Eichner. It’s not clear to me how this book came together, but from the way it’s written it seems like Adler was likely in the room, following Eichner and his staff around as they work to keep this project moving. I suspect this book is sort of like Car, the sort of thing the subject probably regrets authorizing after the fact (1540 Broadway ultimately lost hundreds of millions of dollars and was foreclosed on). One of the best books I’ve read about what it takes to get a building built.
How Real Estate Developers Think by Peter Hendee Brown — Exactly what it says on the tin. Brown interviewed over 100 real estate developers, and distilled those conversations down into a cogent explanation of how real estate development operates, from the perspective of the developers themselves. By far the best book I’ve read about real estate development.
Form Follows Finance by Carol Willis — Written by an architectural historian and founder of “The Skyscraper Museum”, this book looks at skyscrapers in New York and Chicago in the late 19th up through the mid-20th century from a financial perspective: how the twin constraints of needing to make a profit and zoning rules and regulations influenced the form that the buildings took. A great look at the economics of early skyscraper construction and its influence on aesthetics, with the only downside being that it mostly doesn’t cover the late 20th century when modernism was taking hold.
Other books that don’t quite reach the level of “great” but are nonetheless worth reading are John Tauranac’s book on the Empire State Building and Glanz and Lipton’s book about the World Trade Center.
New York congestion pricing
Congestion pricing has now been in place in New York for a little less than two weeks, and folks are eager to understand how well it’s working. So far the answer still seems to be “shockingly well”. From the Financial Times:
New Yorkers are cruising much faster along Manhattan’s bridges and tunnels since their city implemented its long-debated congestion pricing plan early this month, according to newly available traffic data.
Morning rush-hour speed from New Jersey through the Holland Tunnel, a main route under the Hudson River into Manhattan, has almost doubled to 28mph compared with a year earlier. Evening speed over the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn has increased from 13mph to 23mph.
If these trends hold, motorists willing to pay the $4.50-$14.40 toll to enter the congestion zone in the centre of the US’s busiest city will save thousands of hours per year they currently waste crawling through smoggy tunnels or over clogged bridges.
And the folks at Bloomberg aimed a camera at a congestion-priced road to do their own analysis of traffic changes:
Situated on 59th Street, overlooking the congestion pricing zone perimeter, the newsroom aimed a high-definition camera at Lexington Avenue – a major thoroughfare into the zone from the Upper East Side – and collected more than a hundred hours of daytime traffic imagery before and after congestion pricing went into effect…
To compare changes in the traffic, Bloomberg News collected data over two periods: two weeks in December before the holidays and, again during the first week of congestion pricing. The analysis covered approximately 75,000 vehicles over more than 100 hours of midday traffic, starting roughly at 8 a.m. and ending at 4 p.m. each day…
Nearly all of the reduced vehicle entries to the congestion pricing zone appear to be due to personal vehicles no longer making the trip, according to Bloomberg’s analysis. The share of private cars traveling down Lexington Avenue dropped by six percentage points — from 40% to 34% of overall traffic — while the percentage of yellow cabs increased by seven percentage points. The share of Uber and Lyft and other commercial vehicles, like semi-trucks and delivery vans, remained largely unchanged….
The analysis showed virtually no change in the average estimated vehicle value from before and after congestion pricing. If anything, more expensive vehicles were seen slightly less frequently than before. Meanwhile, the share of vehicles worth an estimated $15,000 or less — approximately the bottom 10th percentile of observed traffic — increased slightly after congestion pricing.
Homes that survived the LA fires
This Bloomberg article looks at the design of some homes that managed to survive the LA fires. It mostly seems to match what we saw when we previously looked at wildfire-resistant construction: design details and things like clearing space around the house are especially important, and you can accomplish this while still using wood construction.
Some of the fire-proofing decisions made by Chasen stand out in the picture. The yard is a protected area free of vegetation, fenced off by cast-in-place concrete garden walls, with landscaping in a sparse Mediterranean desert style. The home’s owner has been through fires before, so he was prepared: He removed trash cans and other loose items from around the house and even left the side gates open, knowing that a fire can spread along a fence to a house…
Other design factors are more subtle. Along the side of the house there are no eaves or overhangs, which can form eddies or trap embers blown by high winds. The house doesn’t have any attic vents to allow sparks to get inside the roof, which is metal, with a fire-resistant underlayment. And the house is simple: front-gabled without multiple roof lines, dormers or other pop-outs, which are vulnerable intersections in a fire.
Still other elements are invisible — yet critical. The walls of the house have a one-hour fire rating. The deck is Class A wood, as resistant to ignition as concrete or steel, Chasen says. Tempered glass protects the interiors. And the front of the house was built with heat-treated wood, shielded from flying sparks and embers by the extruding walls and roof line.
Chinese vs Starlink
We’ve previously noted that China is working on its own version of Starlink. It’s also apparently investigating ways to disable Starlink satellites. From the South China Morning Post:
Starlink is not as invulnerable as previously thought, according to a team of award-winning scientists in China who recently simulated a space operation targeting the giant constellation.
Results from the computer simulation showed that China could effectively approach nearly 1,400 Starlink satellites within 12 hours using just 99 Chinese satellites. These could be equipped with lasers, microwaves and other devices to conduct reconnaissance, tracking or other operations.
“The potential military application value of the Starlink mega constellation has been highlighted in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. In recent years, the militarisation of space has intensified, posing a significant threat to China’s space security. It is particularly important to track and monitor its operational status,” wrote the project team led by Wu Yunhua, director of the aerospace control department at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Their peer-reviewed paper was published on January 3 in the Chinese academic journal Systems Engineering and Electronics.
Related, China apparently didn’t have the best year space-launch wise. From Bloomberg:
China’s space program ended the year with a double disappointment.
A rocket from state-backed CAS Space self-destructed after takeoff in late December. The failure was the 68th Chinese launch of the year, according to data compiled by Harvard’s Jonathan McDowell. That set a national record — barely. It topped by one the launch total from 2023, but was far behind the roughly 100 launches that officials had predicted.
Most of those were supposed to be from state-run China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., which expected almost 70 missions of its family of Long March rockets. Instead, the national champion managed only about 50, and not without embarrassment. A Long March 6A created one of the biggest sources of space junk in decades.
The situation for Chinese startups was worse.
It’s been a decade since President Xi Jinping began allowing investment in space companies, some of which have managed to send satellites to orbit. Private-sector companies like LandSpace and Galactic Energy had fewer than 10 launches for the year, including one failure by Beijing Interstellar Glory.
Orienspace had a launch in January but then went quiet the rest of the year. Space Pioneer in July crashed a booster into a mountain during an engine test.
Space startups
On this side of the Pacific, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, after almost 25 years and billions of dollars of investment, finally launched a rocket. From Ars Technica:
The first stage burned for more than three minutes before the second stage separated at an altitude of 70 km. Then, the upper stage's two BE-3U engines appeared to perform flawlessly, pushing the Blue Ring pathfinder payload toward orbit. These engines burned very nearly for 10 minutes before shutting down, having reached an orbital velocity of 28,800 kph.
For the first time since its founding, nearly a quarter of a century ago, Blue Origin had reached orbit. The long-awaited debut launch of the New Glenn rocket, a super-heavy lift vehicle developed largely with private funding, had come. And it was a smashing success.
Similar to SpaceX’s rockets, New Glenn is designed to have a self-landing, reusable first stage, though the self-landing failed during this launch.
And launch vehicles aren't the only place we’re seeing interesting space developments. A SpaceX launch earlier this week carried payloads from no less than four YCombinator startups:
Inversion Space builds “autonomous re-entry vehicles to deliver cargo from space”, Alba Orbital builds low-cost microsatellites, CareWeather is building mass-produced weather satellites, and Elodin Systems creates “flight software, simulations, and hardware for drones, satellites, and defense.” And these are just a few of the (by my count) 24 space industry companies that YC has funded, made possible in large part by SpaceX driving down launch costs.