Urbanitus

03/11/2021

01/11/2021

28/03/2021

NEW from Mary Herr Tally and Shuronda Robinson

"This current “strong manager” system is a relic from nearly 100 years ago, during the Jim Crow era, when powerful local businessmen conspired to replace Austin’s elected leadership with a system of government that separated the decision-makers in city hall from direct accountability to the voters. Real estate speculator and notorious segregationist Monroe Shipe, along with his influential friends, deliberately built a wall between Austin voters and city leadership. They knew that in a system where Austin’s leadership was not accountable to the voters, their money and status would be an advantage to ensuring that city policies favored them."

“We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union….” Many of us remember reciting the Preamble to our Constitution in grade school and decades later now truly understand those powerful words. We know too well that the critical balance of our American democracy is under...

27/03/2021

NEW from David Judson

"If Texas is to continue its dramatic growth economically and demographically, slow-moving state lawmakers need to get out of the way of the fast-moving cities that are driving the success story but hampered by old mindsets of governance.

A new “Metropolitan Blueprint” for the state produced by three leading research universities and published March 24 makes that case far more diplomatically. And three panels of more than a dozen experts who contributed to the report, and who discussed it in a live conference the same day, made the argument more politely."

If Texas is to continue its dramatic growth economically and demographically, slow-moving state lawmakers need to get out of the way of the fast-moving cities that are driving the success story but hampered by old mindsets of governance.A new “Metropolitan Blueprint” for the state produced by th...

26/03/2021

https://www.urbanitus.com/texas-should-empower-local-innovation-not-block-it-argues-a-new-metropolitan-blueprint/

If Texas is to continue its dramatic growth economically and demographically, slow-moving state lawmakers need to get out of the way of the fast-moving cities that are driving the success story but hampered by old mindsets of governance.A new “Metropolitan Blueprint” for the state produced by th...

10/03/2021

NEW from David B. Spence - Professor of Law and Regulation, University of Texas and co-organizer of EnergyTradeoffs.com

"At the heart of the Texas blackout is a myopic faith in the price signal. It may work well under a wide range of market conditions, including intense summer heat. But it badly undervalues the kind of massive, long-duration loss of supply we experienced last month.

Some Texas government officials blamed frozen wind turbines. But it quickly became clear that all of the technologies on which ERCOT had been depending failed, for different storm-related reasons, but at roughly similar rates.

The more interesting and important question is how much blame should be allocated to ERCOT’s electricity market structure, which is much more reliant on price signals to provide affordable, reliable service than those of other electricity markets."

The “what” is pretty clear. The “why” will take a little longer.The “what,” of course is that last month Texas’ electric power grid failed spectacularly in the face of a winter storm of unprecedented intensity, duration and geographic breadth (at least, for Texas). The most serious fai...

09/03/2021

NEW - “We could have had real rolling blackouts…” rather than a blanket outage, Rai said.

The sure-to-be-lengthy post-mortem of Texas’ February energy catastrophe needs to turn on deeper questions, all more fundamental than a mere ideology-framed debate on regulation vs. de-regulation.Not only that argues Varun Rai, director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin....

08/03/2021

NEW from Christopher Sellers -

"The Texas ice storm of February 2021 did not just knock out the power for 4.5 million people, it resuscitated a dormant debate over the wisdom of the state’s deregulated market for electricity:

Should such a vital service should be entrusted so entirely to the free market?"

The Texas ice storm of February 2021 did not just knock out the power for 4.5 million people, it resuscitated a dormant debate over the wisdom of the state’s deregulated market for electricity: Should such a vital service should be entrusted so entirely to the free market?

05/03/2021

"And, in the popular imagination at least, everyone in California is moving to Texas — drawn by low taxes, cheap houses and a low-regulation lifestyle.

But is this last point really true? Is everybody moving from California to Texas?"

Rice University Kinder Institute for Urban Research

In the past, the influx of Californians to Texas has fluctuated from year to year. However, since 2018, the West Coast migration has remained high. Why is that? (Hint: It’s not oil prices.)

04/03/2021

NEW - from Craig D Pedersen - "Sheryl Sculley’s story of local governance is at the heart of many current public issues, with broader meaning beyond one city and one career."

Review: Greedy Bastards – One City’s Texas-Size Struggle to Avoid a Financial Crisis, by Sheryl Sculley, 2020, 211 pp., Lioncrest Publications Joint editor’s note: Like so many cities, Austin is in a process of rapid transformation. To better understand this moment and its consequences for the...

01/03/2021

"Like many cities across the US, the rapidly expanding and gentrifying Texas city is looking to shrink its climate footprint. So its initial plan was to virtually eliminate gas use in new buildings by 2030 and existing ones by 2040. Homes and businesses would have to run on electricity and stop using gas for heat, hot water and stoves.

The proposal, an existential threat to the gas industry, quickly caught the attention of Texas Gas Service. The company drafted line-by-line revisions to weaken the plan, asked customers to oppose it and escalated its concerns to top city officials."

The Guardian

The fossil fuel industry is using the same playbook to fight city climate plans around the country

01/03/2021

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-56175714

Climate change could destroy "entire cities" in a matter of decades, says Sir David Attenborough.

22/02/2021

NEW - Christopher Matos provides his critical insights on what happened in Texas in the last week.

"When all is said and done, the one big takeaway from Texas’ week of freezing agony amid a power blackout is that recovery will be time-consuming and horribly expensive — ironically so since the culprit was a system designed to be price competitive. There are some opportunities to accelerate creation of true resilience, including microgrid concepts capable of serving small islands of load when the greater grid fails or is stressed, and encouragement of local storage with emerging battery technologies. The burdens, meanwhile, are certain to fall on the poorest and most vulnerable, particularly communities of color who often lift in neighborhoods with the oldest infrastructure to begin with."

When all is said and done, the one big takeaway from Texas’ week of freezing agony amid a power blackout is that recovery will be time-consuming and horribly expensive -- ironically so since the culprit was a system designed to be price competitive. There are some opportunities to accelerate creat...

19/02/2021

These organizations could really use your time or money.

19/02/2021

NEW from Barry Kahn

"As Texas lawmakers cast their gaze on crime, criminal justice, and policing, they might consider reform embraced by other states from Pennsylvania to Utah to Georgia reducing post-prison stigma to save the state more than $800 million annually, reduce family poverty and combat homelessness"

Reentry. It sounds simple enough. Once someone is released from prison, they need to reenter society. Popular culture often discusses this psychological and social predicament. One need look no further than movies like Shawshank Redemption, a thriller charged with a tough social realism. But the rea...

18/02/2021

NEW - from Isabelle S. Headrick

"As in Austin today, the construction of rail, public transportation, communication systems, and massive commercial spaces accelerated the flow of people and information to create a new geography of experience and imagination in the 19th Century"

The rule of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was bracketed by two violent revolutions in the French capital: the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. Elected as president in 1848, he staged a coup three years later and, like his famous uncle, anointed himself emperor of the “Second Empire......

17/02/2021

NEW - from Cathy Boggs and Larry F. Martinez - "A small piece of a big law, the ransacking of the Capitol, and the uncertain future of Big Tech"

"The downstream implications for emerging technology hubs like Austin are impossible to foresee. But they go far beyond just the substantial and growing footprint all have in the city. Debate over Section 230 is already animating proposals to bust up the tech giants, and that discussion alone could dampen venture capitalists’ enthusiasm for start-ups created with hopes for acquisition by Big Tech. Anything slowing America’s frenzy for innovation could damage the demand for the engineering and development talent that has so energized the economies of cities like Austin, Denver, Miami and others."

Talk about timing. On Jan. 7, 2021, less than 24 hours following the attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Los Angeles Times published a defense of “Section 230,” the legislative language that many have identified as being a key enabler for the social media-fueled assault against the legislative branc...

13/02/2021

NEW - Sarah Brayne, sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin sits down with Jeremi Suri to discuss her new book 'Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing'.

"Her new book has been lauded for revealing the collaboration between police departments, private data brokers, and technology companies in ways similar to the role big data actors increasingly play in marketing, health care, finance and other sectors. The police departments leading the nation’s drive toward data analytics are in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, which is why, Brayne explained, she chose the LAPD for her research."

If America is to learn how to police better, it actually must learn how to police less. So argues author and University of Texas at Austin sociologist Sarah Brayne, who spent months embedded with the Los Angeles Police Department to examine the use of sweeping new data tools -- which she concluded m...

25/01/2021

New from Michael Shear, Director Broadband Planning Initiatives

"Now events have moved us to realign the ‘pieces’ again. COVID-19 is a catalyst to change the order of things. It has made us all, to some extent, ‘different’ people than we were before."

Children, inescapably, have a fascination with kaleidoscopes. They don’t need to know that the kaleidoscope was invented in 1816 by Sir David Brewster or that the word comes from the Greek words kalos (“beautiful”), eïdos (“form”), and skopeïn (“to view”) to fully absorb the experien...

16/01/2021

NEW - from Dr. Peniel Joseph

"The commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s holiday resonates differently this year. The celebration of perhaps the most important civil rights leader in American history takes place against the backdrop of a White supremacist insurrection against the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6. The desecration of the citadel of democracy triggered the unprecedented second impeachment of a sitting U.S. president, underscoring the perilous nature of American civic life almost 53 years after King’s assassination."

The commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s holiday resonates differently this year. The celebration of perhaps the most important civil rights leader in American history takes place against the backdrop of a White supremacist insurrection against the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6. The des...

15/01/2021

NEW - Associate Editor Robert Brehm reviews Pete Buttigieg's Trust, and reflects on the recent events in the nation's capitol.

"Turning the pages, the very worst of what is the focus of Buttigieg’s second book was playing out before the nation: The U.S. Capitol building, and the sacred institutions that it houses, came under an unprecedented and horrifying assault by an unleashed mob of partisans. At least as disconcerting, while this invasion began to pour down upon the seat of our government, efforts were under way inside to overturn the results of our most treasured mechanism of maintaining a cohesive society – our election."

Endeavoring to read and produce a review of a book called Trust amid the events of recent days was both a challenge and an unexpected inspiration. For Trust – America’s Best Chance, written by former Democratic candidate for President, Pete Buttigieg, is really about the lack of it – a reality...

14/01/2021

“Everyone’s just so worried about the mortality thing and that’s terrible and it’s awful. But man, and all the survivors and the people who have tested positive this is, it’s going to be a problem,” Dr. Bankhead-Kendall said.

CBS DFW

Texas trauma surgeon Dr. Brittany Bankhead-Kendall says it’s a rarity that any of her COVID-19 patients X-rays come back without dense scarring.

08/01/2021

Part V of V of Leadership in the Time of COVID-19 - Imagining What Lies Beyond - from CEO of data.world, Brett Hurt

"But now, as we emerge from nearly a year of cocooning, masking, and working and learning from home, these are no longer just useful planks fortuitously around us in the roiling sea. They are the building blocks of the new knowledge economy and knowledge society that the seers have been predicting for decades. In a word, universal and ubiquitous access is the attribute of hope I see towering on the near horizon."

In the classical Greek myth, Pandora opened her infamous box, releasing death, destruction and untold suffering into the world, much like a virus called COVID-19. But then she closed it as quickly as she could, and she trapped inside one remaining human attribute. This was hope. Throughout this seri...

07/01/2021

Part IV of V of Leadership in the Time of COVID-19 - Acceptance - from CEO of data.world, Brett Hurt

"The point here, in all facets of our lives, is this word I keep returning to, access. Personally, we have all learned that there is so much more we can do to improve ourselves and serve others with the digital consciousness that the pandemic has, however painfully, instilled in every corner of society. Education will never be the same. Medicine has been fundamentally changed, by telemedicine in the case of access to physicians and by a new pace and standard in the case of vaccinology."

If the fear phase of my pandemic journey fused suddenly, and if the state of euphoria came as the crest of a wave, the third stage of depression arrived more like fog rolling in, a malaise that crept upon me slowly.As I suggested in my first essay, the catalyst of the cancellation of the SXSW festiv...

06/01/2021

Part III of V of Leadership in the Time of COVID-19 - Depression - from CEO of data.world Brett Hurt

"How long was this really going to last? How many of our citizens was it going to kill? How were we going to pull together as a country, in some form of unity to fight the virus, address racial injustice, save our small businesses, and bridge our vast political divide? When was I going to get to see my team in person again? It had been so long, and I chuckled to myself about our original two week work-from-home plan. I’m an optimist, not a cynic, but it was really settling in – this was going to be a long haul through the darkness."

If the fear phase of my pandemic journey fused suddenly, and if the state of euphoria came as the crest of a wave, the third stage of depression arrived more like fog rolling in, a malaise that crept upon me slowly.As I suggested in my first essay, the catalyst of the cancellation of the SXSW festiv...

05/01/2021

Part II of V of Leadership in the Time of COVID-19 - Euphoria - from CEO of data.world Brett Hurt

“The pandemic,” Mullenweg argued, “is a time for companies to ask themselves ‘what are we really selling?’ as he noted the old yarn that selling a drill bit is really about selling a hole in the wall. We repeatedly asked ourselves this question. We honed our message, iterated more quickly, and the market for our tools began to pick up at a faster pace. The pandemic was driving a real need for our customers to collaborate on data – and we were listening to them better than ever before. With the surge in innovation, we were releasing almost 100 new iterations of our platform each month. And we still are."

It was the eve of the last day in April, the end of the first quarter of our fiscal year and there was really no way to describe it other than what I wrote to my data.world colleagues: “Team, there are times in a company’s history that are truly defining.”This was one of them as we closed in o...

04/01/2021

New - Part I of V of Leadership in the Time of COVID-19 from CEO of data.world Brett Hurt

“This is real, and this is real bad,” I said out loud, to no one in particular. If the city was walking on a $380 million turnover on expected economic activity. If the mayor was taking this drastic a step just two days after his own chief health officer Mark Escott had given the festival the all clear… well, what was in store for my almost five-year-old start-up scarcely at the beginning of our most ambitious year for investment fundraising, new customers, revenue and growth? My anxiety, my unease, was instantly transformed to something far more profound. Fear descended upon me, as if from all four walls. Raw and unforgiving."

It was late in the afternoon of March 6. A month or so of headlines had focused on this strange new virus emerging in China’s Wuhan province, killing the then-staggering number of 3,000 -- almost all of the victims in that country. The movie “Contagion” was already trending in the top 10 most ...

03/01/2021

Synthesized below are brief clips from each participant in our 3rd Roundtable discussion, which was originally recorded on Dec. 11, 2020. Also included are some of the highlights from the three contributors, who spoke to Urbānitūs Associate Editor Robert Brehm.

This roundtable, however, is no typical post-election analysis in which participants pore over maps of red and blue. Instead, our contributors discuss how people in some of Austin’s more precarious communities feel about the elections, the future of transit, health care priorities and the city’s progressive paradox against the backdrop of enduring challenges like inequality and a worldwide pandemic.

Panelists included Brooke Shannon, Carmen Llanes Pulido and Susana Almanza.

Synthesized below are brief clips from each participant in our discussion, which was originally recorded on Dec. 11, 2020. Also included are some of the highlights from the three contributors, who spoke to Urbānitūs Associate Editor Robert Brehm. Democrats harbored hopes of taking Texas for the fi...

02/01/2021

Coming next week to Urbanitus - a 5 part series that examines a CEO's journey through the COVID-19 pandemic, brought to you by Brett Hurt of data.world

Begins Monday, stay tuned.