– Your Bright Brothers Team
David Romako / Josh Yeager /  Brandi Walsh

Does your city have too many restaurants? Your stomach might say no, but the data is pretty darn damning. The lifelines that many restaurants were thrown during the pandemic (everything from fanbase-driven initiatives like take-out and gift card sales rallies, and even the Restaurant Revitalization Fund) may not be enough to keep your favorite chefs employed. Even before the pandemic, restaurants were in a questionable position, and new numbers crunched by the folks at The Counter bring an illuminated position to the picture. Since 2001, restaurants have grown at a faster rate than the populations they serve, which means there are fewer potential customers per restaurant today than in 2001. There are just too many restaurants per person in many metros for them all to survive. By dividing the population in five major metros by the number of restaurants, the outlook in every city points to an overpopulation of purveyors — and that doesn’t even include competitors like food trucks, pop-ups and corner carts. Is the story all woe and gloom for the food-making ratepayers in your district?  Not necessarily. Columbia Business School restaurant consultant Stephen Zagor thinks that differentiation and elasticity are key, stating that ingredients for success are “…some of the pandemic’s greatest hits, including a curated market component or wine shop, meal kits, catering, stepped-up take-out and delivery,” among other things. Zagor also points to necessary “austerity” meaning cutbacks within the business model and possibly early closures. How is the restaurant scene faring in your city, and how much is your organization doing to support those stakeholders in terms of education, fostering modernization and matching merchants with money? We’d love to hear from you.

Credit: U.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics

In the age of Instagram our youth are subject to serious societal pressures, as we’ve all been discussing since (or even before) the now-infamous whistleblower Francis Haugen testified to Congress about Meta’s infractions last fall. So how can we turn something like selfie-culture into a positive?  One program in North Philadelphia empowers students to tell their stories, and those of their neighborhoods — turning them into a force for good. Photography Without Borders teaches school-aged students life skills through the lens of photography, that allow them to explore their communities, but also find themselves in the process. One student in particular, 19 year-old John Arroyo, who used to be shy and anxiety-ridden, had his photo featured as a magazine cover. Arroyo said of the program that it, “It’s kind of like me breaking through that wall that I put up,” and that the program helped him to “not be afraid of how I dress or how I talk, or how I put myself out [there].” And if that’s not a winning picture, we don’t know what is.

Photo Credit: Jesús Rincón

Are you ready for the metaverse?  You’re probably already there. If you’ve ever had a text conversation with a customer service bot (think Amazon), gotten help, directions, the weather or ordered something with a virtual assistant (think Siri or Alexa), or ever done a search on Google — you’ve crossed the gap. Simply put, the metaverse is the overlapping confluence of the internet (as we know it) with our real lives. This means virtual interactions, transactions, collaborations and creations without being face-to-face, IRL. It’s like living inside the web. With advances in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) accelerated in some ways by the pandemic (seriously, how many Zooms were you on before COVID hit?), we’ve now entered the age of meta. For some of us, specifically early adopters of tech (like the gaming community) have been in the metaverse for ages now. As the divide between IRL and the virtual realms dissolve, we’re all headed into the metaverse headlong and there’ll be no going back. Time put together this illustrative article on what the metaverse really means, with some tangible real world examples. On top of that, Entrepreneur posits that Singularity is fast approaching. Singularity is when Artificial Intelligence (AI) supersedes our own intelligence and then escapes our control. All of this was sci-fi fodder in the past, and yet here we are, fully one fifth into the 21^st century, and our reality is about to get a whole lot more artificial. Is that a bad thing? And more importantly, what does it mean for your district, your ratepayers and stakeholders?  Do you have a plan for how your district will transition into the metaverse?  If so, you’re among the leaders in this regard, and we’d love to hear from you.

Public realm enhancements don’t have to be big, showy and expensive capital improvement projects. Many districts do “more with less” and engage their local creative class and artistic communities with placemaking stalwarts like painted utility boxes, standpipes or street bollards. One piece that sparked joy in us recently is this StreetsBlog USA bracket competition to determine the best bus stop in America. Where “pubic art meets public transit” puts a smile on our face, and there are some really innovative contenders!  Going beyond merely paint and poles, we can’t wait to find out who the winner will be, but for now, we invite you to revel in these creative pieces of public infrastructure!
 
Photo credit: mmmm….

We write a lot about the 15-Minute City, and this set of data took a look at 141 cities with a population of 200K or more and ranked them by Walk Score, Transit Score and Bike Score. Compare and contrast your local metro with competitor cities and let us know how ya rank!