Construction Physics
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at a setback for California Forever, a $500 million artillery shell plant not producing any shells, the difficulty of recycling EV batteries, manufacturing wire harnesses, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
Housekeeping items this week:
Origins of Efficiency is apparently one of the most purchased books by startup founders, according to Brex (a credit card aimed at startups).
Housing and Cities
We’ve previously seen homeowners in the Bay Area asking for OpenAI or Anthropic stock when they sell their house, but apparently you also see landlords asking for equity share as part of the leasing agreement. (I’ve seen some claims this is fake, but Byrne Hobart noted that this sort of deal took place with Paypal.) [X]
A setback for California Forever, which is trying to build a new California city northeast of the Bay Area. Part of the plan involved a huge new shipyard, but one of the tenants for that shipyard, automated vessel startup Saronic, is now setting up shop in Texas instead. [SF Chronicle]
California Forever’s bid to recruit a major industrial tenant for a planned waterfront shipbuilding facility in Solano County has slipped away, a significant blow to the ambitious but heavily scrutinized billionaire-backed plan to build an entire new city on thousands of acres of farmland.
Defense startup Saronic Technologies, which designs and builds autonomous water crafts, has chosen Texas — where the company has been considering the Port of Brownsville — over Solano County for its $3.2 billion Port Alpha automated shipyard, according to multiple sources familiar with the negotiations.
In my essay about build to rent housing, I noted that one developer I spoke to said that one benefit of rental housing was giving access to good school districts to people who couldn’t otherwise afford to live there. A recent paper in Real Estate Economics suggest this is actually a pretty significant benefit (though I haven’t read this paper closely). [Wiley]
Using a unique data set of linked student-housing-unit records from North Carolina and a fixed effects research design, we document an association between increases in the supply of single-family rental units (SFRs) and the likelihood that economically disadvantaged children attend higher performing schools. Drawing on exogenous variation in the allocation of SFRs across neighborhoods, we find that children in renter households were more likely to experience improvements in school quality when relocating to areas with an ample supply of SFRs zoned for high-performing schools. Using a shift-share identification strategy with school-level data, we also provide evidence supporting the generalizability of our results to other markets throughout the United States.
The Wall Street Journal on how Baby Boomers, unlike their parents, aren’t necessarily downsizing to smaller homes when they retire. [WSJ]
Manufacturing
A cool video of automated carbon fiber manufacturing. [X] And a cool video of Tesla ripping out the Model X/Model S production line. [X]
The New York Times on the enormous setbacks in US EV manufacturing. Manufacturers pivoted away from them so quickly that in one case Chevy cancelled production of an EV between when they gave a review model to a publication and when that review came out. “In purely financial terms, the combined cost of this industry about-face remains nothing short of staggering: This year, Stellantis alone was forced to write down $26 billion in E.V.-related losses. (Ford reported a slightly less ghastly $19 billion loss.) But somehow, it’s the long-term repercussions that look worse. “The way I’d put it,” the auto journalist Martin Padgett told me recently, “is that we pulled a U-turn while the rest of the world was pushing forward.” [NYT]
Related, things look pretty bleak for US EV manufacturer Lucid Motors. “Lucid Group on Tuesday denied as “completely false” a blog post saying it was considering a potential take-private transaction or a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, after the electric-vehicle maker’s shares tumbled more than 50% in what would be their steepest one-day decline [BP: though they ended the day down 16%, not 50%]. Lucid said it had sufficient liquidity to fund operations well into the next year, and had not formed a special board committee to explore the reported scenarios. It also said restructuring adviser AlixPartners was assisting the company on improving execution and operations, and was not recommending bankruptcy.” [Reuters]
A $500 million plant for producing 155mm artillery shells has yet to produce any, despite coming online more than two years ago. The culprit seems to be the fact that General Dynamics tried to repurpose the original shell manufacturing equipment, designed for a different type of artillery shell, rather than spin up an entirely new production line. [The War Zone]