Helping leaders build a world for 10 billion people. Former Sierra Club president, Saatchi, Amazon & Trove. Now: Planet 10B & Transparent City.
San Francisco, CA
Joined January 2009
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Stopping things is not a strategy for ten billion people (what we'll have by 2050). If you want to protect wild land, you have to build denser cities, clean power, and farms that grow more on less land.
Austin auto theft is down 31% this year. But catalytic converter theft went from 32 to 272.
Austin police logged 2,346 auto theft incident records from Jan. 1 through Oct. 10, down 31% from 3,401 a year earlier. Catalytic converter theft records went the other way, climbing from 32 to 272. transparent.city/c/austin/st…
San Francisco opened environmental review on the Caltrain railyards at 4th and King on Sept. 30. Prologis has two plans: up to 5,834 apartments, or 1,765 apartments plus 5.6 million square feet of offices. Comments close Oct. 30. 5,000+ apartments would be awesome.
NYC ambulances took 141 seconds longer to reach life-threatening calls this summer than last. 82 of those seconds passed before an ambulance was even dispatched.
NYC ambulances took an average of 862 seconds to reach life-threatening medical calls from June 8 to Sept. 21, up from 721 in the same weeks of 2025. Of the 141 extra seconds, 82 came before an ambulance was even dispatched. transparent.city/c/new-york-…
Rents ate 78% of the growth in California's food aid since 1989. More aid without more homes just ends up as rent.
adamwerbach retweeted
Mark Pincus, founder of @Zynga, on "proven, better, new," the product framework that was Zynga's religion:
1. Proven: start with what 10/10 existing users of a category already love, and don't change it.
"You do not have the right to change proven. You have not taken enough time to change proven. It is an art that we do not completely understand."
2. Better: only add what 10/10 users agree is better.
"For Zynga Poker, better was no download. That was it. Turns out you lose half your users every time you click download."
3. New: treat anything you think is better as new, and assume it fails.
"Assume all new fails. Write that on the wall... If all new worked, we'd be using new s**t all the time. But how often do you change what's on the front of your iPhone?"
"Users don't care how innovative it is. All they care about is does it feel better, and they can't even tell you why."
@markpinc w/ @JoshLu
SR008 APPS ARE OPEN. Up to $1M + $10M+ in credits. 12 weeks in SF, Feb through April. Built to help you land capital, customers and talent. Apply by Nov 1: speedrun.a16z.com/apply
TVA is putting new wire on 125 miles of lines it already owns. That adds about 1,900 megawatts for $159.7 million. No new towers and no new land to fight over.
Sonoma County banned backyard cottages on 3,997 parcels outside its cities. The state told the county last year that the ban broke state law. It ends Nov 5. Letting people build a cottage in their own yard should not take a letter from Sacramento.
Prop 1 on the Nov. 3 ballot is $10 billion for state housing programs and $1.25 billion for veterans' home loans. The housing part would cost the General Fund $500 million to $600 million a year for about 25 years. That money only turns into homes if cities let them get built.
Sofas, not bags, drove almost all of SF’s dumping rise — Mission alone logged more than twice the Tenderloin.
San Francisco's Mission logged 13,890 illegal dumping complaints through Oct 11, more than twice the Tenderloin. Citywide filings hit 86,515, up 3.1%, and furniture dumping drove 88% of that rise. Sofas, not bags, are moving the total.
transparent.city/c/san-franc…
Faster reviews, fewer finished homes. Speed is a good start but it’s not everything.
Cincinnati reviews new residential permits in 56 days on average, down from 82 last year, the fastest since 2017. Completions fell 34%, from 135 to 89 through late September, and Avondale went from 15 to zero. Faster paperwork, fewer finished homes.
transparent.city/c/cincinnat…
Seattle's car thefts fell 20% this year, but thefts from cars rose 7%. Lump them together as "vehicle crime" and you miss that the problem moved from the car to what's inside it. Splitting the category is how you see it.
Seattle police logged 10,559 vehicle-related property crime records Jan through Aug, 46% of all property crime. Car thefts fell 20.2% and parts thefts 24%. Thefts from cars rose 7.1% to 5,772. Fewer cars are leaving. More of what's inside them is.
transparent.city/c/seattle/s…
Fixing potholes is how many citizens judge their government. SF cut average pothole close time from 46 days to 20, yet the open pavement backlog doubled. The next question is why?
San Francisco closed pothole requests in an average of 20 days this year through Oct 4, down from 46. But the open pavement defect backlog grew from 75 cases in January to 152 in September. Faster, just not faster than the queue.
transparent.city/c/san-franc…
The ticket closed three times in five days. The signal on Schaefer Hwy in Detroit kept failing anyway. This is why we track what happens after a 311 case closes, not just the count. cc: @robjective
Detroit's traffic signal at 13339 Schaefer Hwy in the Grand River-I96 area drew three closed requests in five days this September, and one closure was followed by a new request 8.1 hours later. The ticket closed; the signal did not get the memo.
transparent.city/c/detroit/s…
Los Angeles issued 769 permits for backyard ADUs and 65 for apartment buildings from May through early October. Those 65 apartment permits represent 4,790 homes, 75% of all the new homes permitted. We need both.
adamwerbach retweeted
Last week bipartisan Senate negotiators unveiled the most ambitious and serious permitting reform proposal in recent memory.
It was a real pleasure to join @drvolts for a (thorough!) unpacking of what's in bill and why people should care.
open.spotify.com/episode/6t0…
San Francisco supervisors voted 10-1 Tuesday to end shadow review for new housing, except shade on city parks. State environmental law never required it; the city added it. Supervisor Mahmood says shadow appeals slowed more than 2,000 homes since 2017, and a city planner says shadows were the main reason in only 4 of 18.
We should have done this a long time ago. San Francisco is allowing four-story apartment buildings with one main stair plus a fire escape or exterior stair, and five and six stories with one interior stair plus an exterior one. Dropping the second stair is estimated to cut construction cost 6% to 13%.
This is what progress looks like. Starting January 1, California cities get two plan checks on a building permit. After that they approve or deny. Appeals have to be decided in 30 business days for projects up to 25 units, down from 60, and 45 days for bigger ones, down from 90, and a builder can ask a judge to order approval if the city misses it.