Camille Squires

Davos returns later this month. Follow along with our Need to Know: Davos popup email.

Update: On June 24, 2022 the US Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, writing that “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.”

Austin, Texas is beginning to look a lot like California. The city has become the preferred destination for thousands of West Coast emigrants who are making booming Sun Belt cities their new home. That’s created one of the most expensive housing markets in the US. The typical price for a single-family home in Austin has gone from $261,000 to $796,000 in the last decade.

In January of 2021, the city of Toronto announced a sweeping new initiative to improve internet access for its 3 million residents. By building a broadband network owned by the city, the program called ConnectTO would give low-income residents struggling with high prices and slow internet speeds an affordable option. The proposal, received favorably by local community groups and internet-access advocates, was passed by the city council less than a month later in February 2021.

Sunnyside, a neighborhood of about 25,000 residents on the southern side of Houston, Texas is getting ready to live up to its name, The largest urban solar farm in the US will be built on a 240-acre site, a former landfill and nearby incinerator, that emitted tons of toxic fumes over neighbors.

Florida’s state legislature passed a bill Thursday (April 21) revoking The Walt Disney Company’s control over its own self-governed special district within the state. On Friday, governor Ron DeSantis signed the bill, putting an end to the privileges Disney has enjoyed for 55 years exerting unparalleled control over the land its theme park sits on from approving construction codes to the right to build a nuclear plant.

Blackstone, the $84 billion private equity giant and corporate landlord, just made its biggest investment yet in student housing with its $13 billion acquisition of American Campus Communities. The deal, first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday (April 19), means the largest publicly-traded student housing developer in the US is now part of a real estate empire that has made a name for itself by nabbing high-demand real estate (warehouses, single-family rentals) around the country then increasing profits by raising rents or sometimes reducing building services.

Coastal cities like Miami and Guangzhou face the prospect of massive flooding as sea-levels rise. Yet some cities are confronting an even more urgent threat of flooding than one brought on by climate change. A new study of 99 cities around the world published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, reveals some of the world’s major cities are sinking even faster than the sea levels around them are rising.

Austin is getting ready to become the first city in Texas to roll out a guaranteed income program. The pilot will give a group of about 85 low-income residents $1,000 per month, equivalent to about one-third of the city’s median income, for one year.

Less than a week after Philadelphia became the first major city in the US to reinstate a public mask mandate, the city is backing off its plan following massive backlash from residents and businesses.

Business districts have a vacancy problem. The white-collar workers around the US  who fled city centers at the start of the pandemic haven’t all come back yet. Even as some large employers like Google and Apple start to roll out back-to-office policies, it’s looking like many of them may never return.

After falling to historic lows last year, mortgage rates are rising sharply. On April 5, they hit their highest point in more than a decade with the average US interest rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage topping 5%, up from under 3% just a year ago.

On March 31, Washington became the first state in the US to guarantee rideshare drivers receive a minimum wage. The bill, signed into law by governor Jay Inslee, ensures all drivers in the state will earn at least $1.17 per mile and $0.34 per minute, including a minimum pay of $3.00 per trip with benefits such as paid sick leave and workers’ compensation insurance. The new law takes effect in January 2023.

Hi Quartz members,

When “shelter-in-place” orders took effect in March 2020, city and state officials in the US scrambled to get unhoused people off the streets and out of crowded shelters during the covid-19 pandemic. One of their core strategies was renting out unused hotel rooms or buying entire hotels and motels for permanent housing.

Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott is taking on the US housing crisis by giving $436 million to Habitat for Humanity, a non-profit building and financing homes for low-income households.

At the turn of the 20th century, the postal system was the internet of its time. Mail was the way ideas and information spread across America’s long distances before telephones arrived on the scene.

For years, America’s housing advocates have sought to make housing a right as central to America’s Bill of Rights as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Inflation has been a one-two punch for Americans. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted global oil markets sending gasoline prices skyrocketing. As the average price reaches $4.32 per gallon this week, Americans have cut back on travel, and even started paying for gas in installments.  At the same time, rents are steadily increasing as people return to cities driving up demand and rents to record heights. In cities like New York and Miami, rents went up 25% or more within a year.

The US Senate voted unanimously on March 15 to pass legislation that would make daylight saving time permanent, ending the cycle of changing clocks by an hour twice a year that most of the US have been observing since the 1960s. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who co-sponsored the bill, called it an opportunity to “add a little sunlight into most people’s lives.”

What is—or better yet, what was—disco?

Since US president Joe Biden announced a ban on imports of Russian oil on March 8, global oil prices have gone up. As a result, many Americans are seeing higher prices at the gas pump. The average gas price across the US reached $4.32 per gallon on March 10.

TikTok has taken the digital world by storm. Since 2016, the video-focused app has been downloaded more than 2 billion times and in 2020, it became the most-downloaded social media app in the US.

More than 2 million people have fled Ukraine in less than two weeks since Russia invaded the country. In one of the largest and fastest-moving waves of war refugees Europe has seen since World War II, people have poured into neighboring countries like Poland, Hungary, and Romania, while a few have traveled as far as Spain and Israel.