Rise and Shine is a regular morning roundup of links. Tips if you’ve got ‘em.
- For the first time in a decade, New York City has a redesigned municipal website live on NYC.gov. The new site is a generally spruced up and pared down version of the old one, additionally made more mobile-friendly and user-centric. One feature that harried New Yorkers might find most useful is the front and center icons showing wordlessly whether parking meters are in effect, schools are open and garbage pickup is operating normally.
- With little available affordable housing, the city of Vancouver has been issuing permits for “laneway houses,” as in new construction that makes use of bits of backyard space to erect standalone structures that open onto secondary lanes and roads.
- With open spaces at a premium, the city of Toronto is pushing to put up signs identifying its 400 or so privately owned public spaces, or POPS, that might look closed to the masses but are actually available for “retreat, relaxation and recreation.”
- With Chicago facing a crackdown on ride sharing services like Lyft and Sidecar, the Chicago Tribune editorializes that if you’re phobic about hopping in a car with a stranger, you might want to avoid taxicabs, too. Trust the market, the paper says: “The services will establish records for safety and reliability, or they’ll go out of business.” The Trib also notes that California’s new formalization of ride sharing “may be a template for Chicago.”
- Private cars that once only ferried those headed to Dalton and the like are now, thanks to Uber, available to all manner of Manhattan school children.
- The Wall Street Journal reports on the growing national liberalization of zoning laws that once made home-based businesses impossible but are now welcoming everyone from the teacher to the shopkeeper to the fancy cake maker.
- Oakland Local profiles Deborah Acosta, chief innovation officer of San Leandro, Calif., population 85,000. One of Acosta’s projects is turning an old Chrysler plant into an innovation center with hyper-fast Internet connectivity.
- TechCrunch profiles Peerby, a digital platform that ” enables you to borrow the things you need from people in your neighborhood. Right here, right now, for free.”
- Detroit Emergency Manager Kevin Orr faces criticism for failing to live up to his promise to be transparent about the troubled city’s contracts, a mechanism he talked about as making him “accountable to a degree to the people of Detroit.” The city council president argues that the situation highlights a major flaw in Michigan’s emergency manager law.
- And The Gardens of Democracy author Eric Liu advocates ignoring dysfunctional Washington’s latest hand-made crisis and focusing instead on the many innovation cities that are “showing the way forward.”
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Nancy Scola is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work tends to focus on the intersections of technology, politics, and public policy. Shortly after returning from Havana she started as a tech reporter at POLITICO.
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