CityLab Daily: What Counting Cranes Says About Your City

What We’re Following

Cranes in the sky: Reaching hundreds of feet into the sky and dangling over city streets, cranes should be pretty hard to miss. But spotting one in the wild can be a bit like spotting its avian homonym: You have to watch the skies. In some cities, a skyline full of construction equipment has become synonymous with change and displacement. And residents study the cranes like tea leaves.

But they can be a flawed measure of “neighborhood change"—the construction booms they represent could be exacerbating an affordability crisis, or easing one. CityLab’s Sarah Holder went out in San Francisco with one of the construction project managers behind the bi-annual Crane Count that tallies these towering tools. Read her story: What I Learned Counting Cranes in San Francisco.

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More on CityLab

Strokes of Genius

The MacArthur Foundation announced its 26 “genius” fellowship grant recipients today. Although the awards tend to recognize people who are not yet household names, some of the winners may be familiar to CityLab readers.

Brentin Mock spoke with landscape designer Walter Hood in 2017 about designing the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. Last year, former CityLab fellow Teresa Mathew reviewed a show by conceptual artist Mel Chin at the Queens Museum that put a spotlight on community chaos, and CityLab’s Kriston Capps also interviewed Chin for Architect magazine in 2011 about his project that used children’s drawings to raise money for combatting lead soil contamination in New Orleans.

What We’re Reading

Will luxury towers edge out the last of the working-class Chinese residents in New York’s Chinatown? (Vox)

An effort to punish China could slow the roll of electric buses (Wired)

How a Green New Deal would change our homes (Curbed)

After 15 years, Seattle’s radical experiment in no-barrier housing is still saving lives (Crosscut)

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