So you want to think global and act local? Check out Springwise’s Top 10 Eco Business Ideas in 2006. Springwise’s list may be UK-based, but the implementation doesn’t have to be. Here’s their list - visit via the link above to see full profiles of each one.

1. Hailing a hybrid: greentomatocars’s taxi fleet consists only of hybrids.
2. Consumer generated power: Buy a wind generator for your building or neighborhood.
3. Household recycling plant: Save time with an indoor recycling plant - ,

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A local institution on Congress Avenue in Austin, Texas, Las Manitas, a Mexican restaurant and crowd favorites, must say goodbye after 25 years. It’s lease was up, and the building owner already signed a new one with Marriott. However, Austin’s city government isn’t your typical city government, and its leaders proposed to do something about it.

They’re proposing the Congress Avenue Retail Retention and Enhancement Fund to invest in the kinds of businesses they feel reflect the local culture

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Those people who think they’re more likely to die from sharks than deer (you’re 300 times more likely to get killed by a deer via car collision), are probably the same who think you’re more likely to get hit and killed by a car in New York than in Arizona or South Carolina. See the graph above - not true.

Yes, there are a lot of cars in Manhattan (and Boston), for instance, but there are way more pedestrians.  Not only that, only half of Manhattanites have a driver’s license, and there are

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As explained with this graph, The Long Tail represents the present and future of profitability in the internet age. But what about cities? Are they once again left out of the fun?

Cities are rarely mentioned as Long Tail examples, unlike Netflix, but they actually have the most potential to reap significant economic benefits via quality of life and job growth from this business model. If you imagine movies as live/work/play experiences, a truly ‘Netflixed’ city would have every such

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Understanding , the way it’s evolving our economy, and its applications to real estate, what would be the real estate developer/investor equivalent of an Amazon, Google/YouTube, eBay, Netflix?  What’s the big deal?  Millions of people don’t just use these companies’ services, they’re passionate about them. When’s the last time anyone said that about Kodak, GM or Kmart?

As you know, all of these companies invest in ‘a full line of products’ that appeal to what individuals really

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As explained in the previous entry, much of what is built today is in ‘the big head’ of mass production rather than diverse niches of The Long Tail. However, in the internet age, companies focusing on both the Big Head (the mainstream ‘hits’) and the Long Tail (hundreds of niche favorites) are starting to eat the Big Heads for lunch - companies like Google, Netflix and eBay that pretty much cater to every niche, every personal interest you can think of.

In other words, we want a lot more

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“For too long we’ve been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.“ Wired Magazine, The Long Tail, Oct. 2004.

Sound familiar when it comes to strip malls, subdivisions and office parks, which make up a vast majority of new real estate

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People often ask me what I read on a daily basis as far as keeping on top of the industry.  I’ll tell you what exists, and what should exist.

Daily Sources that Exist:

The Creativity Exchange: This is Dr. Richard Florida’s blog on the creative class, and it’s fairly new. If you want to understand the market, this is where to go.
Planetizen: This is the portal for any news pertaining to visionary placemaking, cities, development and planning. It’s a bit comprehensive, so you still have to

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Retail seen as ‘the Achilles’ heel’; of some TODs (transit-oriented development), reads a recent New Urban News headline, spotlighting the Latino Fruitvale Village retail center in Oakland, CA.

We highlighted its difficulties with attracting patrons at the beginning of this year. The key is to establish the retail center as a community center - the equivalent of the town square where ‘everything happens’. In other words, the place needs events, events and more events, and collective ones at

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Does this sound familiar?  “I (or we) would love to buy a condo, but they’re too expensive where I want to live and I don’t want to go the housemate route to help pay the mortgage.“  Or how about this, “I’d really like to live in this neighborhood for at least a couple of years and would love to rent out a contemporary not-so-big efficiency to be able to afford it, but they simply don’t exist.“

Well, both those prayers are about to be answered with what is being referred to as Mortgage

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