Rise and Shine is a regular morning roundup of links. Tips if you’ve got ‘em.
- Some rather amazing footage shot from a streetcar running down San Francisco’s Market Street at the turn of the century, revealing a street life that was a mélange of cars, streetcars, horses, pedestrians, and bicyclists. (via @K7Sinclair)
- Uber and Boatbound offered sails today from the East Bay to San Francisco, part of the former’s bid to be the ‘[anything]-on-demand’ folks and both companies’ eagerness to attract eyeballs.
- Decrying that “cameras are obsessed with showing you decay,” Michigan senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow say that we’re not getting the full Detroit. They give credit to Jack White of the White Stripes (who could use some good publicity of his own), saying he “stepped forward and paid the back taxes owed on the Masonic Temple in Detroit, one of the most stunning theatre and music venues in the world,” and adding, “This kind of generosity is happening over and over again.”
- Can you use open data to predict if a city is going to go bankrupt?
- The Economist asks, “Whatever Happened to Municipal Wireless?”
- The city of Philadelphia and Temple University’s Center for Asian Health have, for the last 18 months, been working with Chinese restaurants in low-income Latino and African-American neighborhoods to reduce the amount of sodium in their dishes. Part of the approach is training restaurant chefs, many of whom have never had professional training, in keeping food tasty with less salt. A spot check found a 20 percent reduction in sodium in chicken lo mein and shrimp and broccoli — which is good, because before it started, the average serving of lo mein had a good deal more sodium than anyone should have in a day.
- Potential 2016 presidential contender, former mayor of Baltimore, and current Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley is reading The Gardens of Democracy, a favorite of the Code for America crowd. Author Eric Liu has said of the book’s scope , “the relationship between citizen and government is in a fertile place for reimagining.” (via Micah Sifry)
- Richmond, Calif. is experimenting with seizing houses under eminent domain as a way of stopping foreclosures. Part of the motivation is that it can be difficult to figure out exactly who holds a loan and how, making it difficult to work out more favorable terms. It’s what Jerry Michalski of the Relationship Economy Expedition talks about as scaling that “breaks the relationships” between humans in our economic endeavors. The Richmond plan can be seen as a bid to scale that dynamic back down, but the banks are not pleased.
- And, ”The best thing about cohousing is the people and the worst thing about cohousing is the people.” An interview with Mark Westcombe, one of the founders of Lancaster Cohousing, which aims to build 25 homes and accompanying shared spaces along the River Lune.
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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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