Reading List 11/16/24
Below is a roundup of this week's news and links related to construction, infrastructure, and building things. Thanks for being a paid subscriber!
A few years ago, tech industry folks frustrated with the state of the Bay Area tried to make Miami a new tech hub. Measured by VC funding, this doesn’t seem to have worked too well:
Top 10 metro areas across the US for seed + Series A funding LTM.
1. Bay Area - 35% of total $
2. NYC-12%
3. Boston-9%
4. LA-6.5%
5. Seattle-3.9%
6. Auston-3.3%
7. DC-2.3%
8. Denver/Boulder-2.2%
9. San Diego-2%
10. Chicago-1.9%
Data from companies on Carta. Miami = No 11
Modular construction tends to do best when there’s a strong incentive to minimize site time. One area where owners appear to really value this is in fast food restaurant construction. Modules can be set and the restaurant can be up and running in just 24 hours, and apparently most McDonalds in the UK are built using modular construction.
Related, German modular construction startup Gropyus has raised 100 million euros. Notably they claim they can reduce costs, a claim most modular builders don’t try to make. Possibly because they’re building apartments out of light-framed timber, whereas most apartment construction in Germany is concrete.
Oak Ridge National Lab has built a database of 131 million buildings in the U.S., using AI-processed satellite data. I might see if I can do something interesting with this data in the future.
The median American homebuyer is now 56 years old, up from 39 years old in 2008 and around 32 years old in the 1980s. As Matt Darling points out, some of this is probably because the median age of the U.S. population is rising.
