There are too many dogs in American cities.

Not just in parks, but in grocery stores, restaurants, and strollers. The urban dog has gone from companion to cultural force—and it’s reshaping how cities work. 🧵 Since 2016, dog ownership in the US jumped from 48M to nearly 60M households.

Pet spending more than doubled.

Meanwhile, fertility dropped below replacement levels. In many cities, dogs now outnumber children.

People have a lot of reasons for voting the way they do. And that's fine!

But if you're in the real estate industry and voting for Trump because you think he'll put more cash in your pocket, you're wrong.

His policies, if implemented, would devastate the industry. (1/7) (2/7) His proposed tariffs would significantly increase the cost of construction materials. A third of steel, a quarter of concrete, and many other things are imported.

It's not quick or easy to replace all that production stateside and would come bring higher costs.

Today I'd like to tell you about the largest landlord in the US, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA).

Estimates of the number of NYCHA residents run from 360,000 to over a million, which would make it the 11th largest city in the country... 🧵 Created in 1934, the majority of NYCHA assets were built between 1945 and 1965. Until 1964, many apartments were reserved for whites and the authority's buildings were majority-white.

That has since changed, as today NYCHA is 90%+ black and hispanic.

Today's Crowdstrike outage reminded me of one of my favorite stories about a single point of failure

And it involves one of the most fascinating buildings in the US, the windowless AT&T Long Lines building at 33 Thomas Street in Tribeca, Manhattan 🧵 I took a tour of this building - led by former AT&T CSO Ed Amoroso - back in 2011.

At the time it was being decommissioned (along with most other landline exchange hubs, like 212 W 18th Street which got windows and became the Walker Tower condos)

And so the process of shutting down all the unlicensed dispensaries in NYC begins.

While they won't be missed, it's worth ruminating on the tremendous failure of governance that got us here.



Over the past ~three years, these weed shops were a big % of all retail leases in Chelsea.

This all started in 2021, when the State of NY legalized recreational marijuana. Per the law, weed could only be sold through state-licensed shops. A new regulatory agency was created.

One last dark comedy thread on SVB.

If you're a VC today, you're trying to figure out how to help your portfolio companies with money stuck in SVB make payroll next week.

This probably means making them a short-term loan of some sort, right? So fine, you figure out some kind of structure - perhaps a convertible note, maybe a safe, maybe something even cleaner - that lets you get money into your companies' accounts now.

All you have to do is make a capital call to your LPs...

$SIVB closure & receivership is going to have a massive impact on the tech ecosystem. SVB was not just a dominant player in tech but were highly integrated in some nontraditional ways. A few things we'll see in the coming days / weeks... One, SVB was incredibly integrated into the lives of many founders. Not just their startup's bank & lender, but also provided personal mortgages and other financial services. A whole mess for FDIC (or the eventual buyer) to unwind.