 I am Roberto Treveño, your councilman for District 1. District 1 encompasses downtown San Antonio. And we're going to be talking about the new urban tech over. I like that. That's kind of clever. I did not come up with that. You may be wondering how technology fits into the built environment. If you think about your own relationship with technology in the last five years, compared to any time previously, it may become clearer. Technology is impacting our every way of existence. This session will explore how technology can contribute to a healthy built environment. This is a forward-thinking session that provides a glimpse into the future, a future full of technological innovation that will most certainly have an impact on the built environment we live in. As new technologies arrive on our doorstep, they can help to provide economic opportunities to many of our underprivileged residents, even without necessarily having an advanced education. One question we can ask ourselves is how we can best maximize these opportunities for underprivileged residents. I want to briefly talk about this is an issue that's really important to me, because certainly as an architect for 20 years, I've seen a lot of these issues come up before me. But as a councilman, they really, really are something that I address on a daily basis. In fact, a little under the weather and I'm breathing heavy because I was just at a meeting regarding this very issue. And so I was running late, literally running here. And so I'm very excited to have this discussion because I think we need to be looking for better ways to help improve our city, to help improve everybody. Everybody's quality of life. And I think we have really three outstanding people here to help represent that diversity of ideas. And certainly we look forward to some great questions. So now I have the honor and privilege of introducing our presenters. We have with us Mitch Hage, he's an urban farmer in downtown San Antonio as CEO of Local Sprout. He's a Trinity graduate. He's a broad member of the Food Policy Council and a columnist at the REVAR report. We also have Stephen Quintanilla. He's a San Antonio native and an MIT graduate. He's co-founder of Space Cadet, a startup that creates a digital marketplace for those who own and want to use space through the sharing economy. He has crowdfunded for community real estate transactions at MassVenture and mentored numerous startups. We also have Peter French. He's a social entrepreneur with a career that includes real estate development, placemaking, public-private partnerships, and strategic planning work. He served as past president of Cafe Commerce, a one-stop entrepreneurship and small business resource center in San Antonio, and is currently the director of operations for the 2200-acre mixed-use Plum Creek Development in Kyle. So with that, I wanna go ahead and start with Mitch Hage. I believe you have a 1500 presentation and each one has a 1500 presentation and then we'll get to some Q and A. Mitch? Well, I'd like to tell a little bit of the story of my company, Local Sprout, first, as a microcosm to think about how technology can affect the built environment and health in general. So Local Sprout is an urban farm. It's a hydroponic farm primarily that's headquartered in the core of downtown, less than a mile away from the Tower of the Americas. In a warehouse that used to be a printing press, we established a hydroponic shipping container farm where in 40 feet worth of space, worth of length and just a normal train car worth of volume, we grow about an acre's worth of leafy greens. Now that gives us a whole bunch of opportunities in terms of direct sales to different folks around the city but it also gives us a lot of opportunities to think about how agriculture could look in the future because this is just the very beginning of what that technology will appear as. We've been operating for about two and a half years or so and we've sold to five wholesalers, about 30 restaurants, direct sales to farmers markets and we've had a lot of partnerships that try to increase education around the city about different ways that agriculture can operate. It is a tremendous opportunity to be able to represent a new type of technology in a place in San Antonio where it's so ripe for expansion. We have a lot of opportunities here for what used to be manufacturing and what now operate a similar niche in the market but end up being a lot more sustainable than traditional manufacturing techniques. We have really cheap labor. We have really cheap electricity and we have really cheap land which in terms of agriculture is a beautiful intersection in order to increase yield really exponentially. So this is actually what one of the farm types looks like in our downtown facility. It ends up looking a lot larger than a normal shipping container would when you start to fill it up with over 3,000 plants and the yield ends up being closer to 40 pounds and we grow kale primarily. Kale it turns out is very popular and well purchased at the moment so it's an easy way to adapt to the local market. It seems much larger than it is once you get inside of it but the space that we're reusing is not a traditionally agricultural productive zone at all. The printing press was kind of abandoned and the 16,000 square foot warehouse that it used to house it had nothing in it for a long time and that version of vacancy is common in that part of the city on the near east side of San Antonio that now is experiencing this extreme resurgence very, very quickly. And so we had the opportunity to be one of the first people to move in to that warehouse and it's since filled with a couple different businesses which you'll hear about soon but it is a really amazing opportunity to use this vacant space. Having so much vacant space so close to the core of our downtown is an obstacle in that we don't have assets that are ready to use that other cities would be proud of. The infill development that we don't have that we seek is currently a greater opportunity than cities that have already filled in have the chance to do because a startup like mine that doesn't have extremely high revenue because agriculture isn't an extremely high margin game wouldn't be able to be so close to the core of the city in a place like Chicago or Boston because that land has already been utilized and so we have a tremendous opportunity to leverage different business types in these underdeveloped areas. We also have grown in partnership with the San Antonio Food Bank. We have a greenhouse. It's about 2,000 square feet out there and in partnership with them greenhouse that they've had for a while that they were not using we started growing basil and we grow about 50 pounds of basil a week in that facility now and a portion of our proceeds get to go back to them. Partnerships I think are something that agriculture can really build a lot of in the city because underutilized space isn't just new lots it's also on lots that currently are not fully filled. Places that have half of a lawn that's filled with Johnson grass are totally unacceptable and we need to fill them with food instead and that's a good way to build partnerships. We can produce revenue for companies that have a limited amount of space that they leverage so far. So normally when I talk about local sprout it's about what the initial impetus was which is to try to avoid large environmental problems. We can adapt to things like climate change we can avoid pesticide use which is causing problems with our pollinators. We can avoid a lot of pretty damaging sort of catastrophic environmental problems if hydroponic agriculture increases but what I wanna talk about today is instead opportunities that come along with hydroponics and urban agriculture that aren't avoiding problems but instead solving ones that wouldn't seem normally connected. So you have the opportunity to grow a tremendous amount of volume in a compact environment in ways that people hadn't been able to in the past controlled environment agriculture which is the broad term that we use for this means that we can grow greens in the middle of the summer which is usually quite difficult to do here and we can grow things like tomatoes in the middle of the winter which is also very hard to do and once you have the ability to produce fresh produce all year long you are able to provide healthier food to everyone all the time. The moment that a food is picked it begins to degrade and ultimately that degradation ends up looking like mold or something else that is unedible but even produce it still looks relatively nice if it has been picked a while ago there's a lot of nutrients that you're losing out on that otherwise you'd be able to get. Being able to connect people as well close spatially to that food means that they're more interested in eating it because they're connected to the story that's involved in that food in the first place. This is especially true of kids and this is why gardens in schools despite not being able to provide a large portion of what's in the cafeteria can increase their eating behaviors when they go home and so our ability to produce food in places all throughout the city increase the stories that people understand their food is connected to and therefore increase the probability that they'll eat healthier food in the first place. During lunch Mayor Taylor talked for a little while about dual use structures and I think that it's important for us to think about ways to leverage existing architecture that is underutilized on buildings that already have an existing purpose. Dual use architecture doesn't just have to be a way to eliminate water waste and also have a path. It's also a building facade or a rooftop or a vacant lot that is not currently in use but will soon be in use. We can produce food in places that we never had the ability to before these technologies have emerged and now that we have the ability to produce on rooftops in these other places we can connect our food closer to us to make eating it more likely but also get ancillary benefits as well. For example, if you can grow food on the roof of a building you have the ability to convert sunlight that would otherwise heat that building into usable biomass. So not only do you get food but you get a lower AC cost. Similarly, you get to solve large environmental pollution problems. If we can use CO2 that otherwise would go into the atmosphere and put those into our small greenhouses or controlled environment agriculture systems then we can increase our yield while decreasing our overall greenhouse gas emissions. And ultimately, and we have not done this at local sprout but in the long-term future the ways to make cities truly sustainable is to make sure that the waste products that are intrinsic to humans are biological wastes that contain lots of phosphorus and potassium. These are really useful fertilizers and the fact that we process them out of our water entirely and get rid of them to try to get new fresh water. It doesn't make as much sense as how historically agriculture has always worked which is to convert waste into something that's usable. I don't have too much time left but I wanna tell a small story about Paris. In the 1800s, they had the most agriculturally productive area in Europe. And the reason is because they had a technology that other people didn't have access to. They had small domed greenhouses, little single plant greenhouses they would put over them. It's because they had the best glass blowers in the world at the moment. And they also had this huge problem that turned out to be an opportunity. They had a ton of horses because there were no cars and those horses tended to produce a lot of waste. That waste, once they put around the plants produced heat to keep them warm during the winter and they produced really good nutrients in order to fertilize those plants in the long term. Now, the dune technology aspect of this hydroponic and urban agriculture system comes from shared sensing data so that we can look at our systems from a far way away. We can use automation and robotics to try to alter how effectively those systems are maintaining themselves. If something goes wrong on my farm, I can look at my phone, determine what it is and hopefully in the future be able to use some amount of automation to adjust and resolve that problem. But our hydroponic nutrient solutions which are the fertilizers that we use, they've improved. A lot of the fundamental technologies and the fabrications for building the systems that we use have also come a long way. And so it's important to think about the intersection not only of the new technologies that can create agriculture but also how we can use these technologies to leverage waste products in our city to combine them to make a more productive, more sustainable place. Thanks. Thank you, Mitch. That was a great presentation. Well, now we're gonna have Stephen Quintanilla come up here and give us his presentation. And again, please obviously write down some questions because we're gonna get to the Q and A here soon. What this individual did using the model that we've been able to pilot and test across the city is he came in and he said, rather than get that full-time lease, let me go ahead and take this space month to month, pay $130 and try out my idea. Let me go and see if I can get the customers that I need, if I can generate the revenue that I need, if I can build a business that way it warrants me going and taking a long-term space. Well, after 10 months, this individual said, you know what, I'm gonna focus on my other business, it's making me a little more money to sustain myself, but the next time, and that was the real success even though this business didn't work, he said the next time, I know what I'm gonna do different. I know that the location's off, I know that I need this type of support, so on and so forth. So even though this entrepreneur, the business they didn't work on didn't work, he was still geared up to come back the next time. He wasn't scared of trying this entrepreneurship thing that we talk about all the time. And a big reason behind that is the traditional way would have meant that he would have been out $15,000 plus other expenses, and this way, rather than having a $15,000 plus debt, he ended up learning for $1,300 because it was $130 month to month for about 10 months. It's a very cheap education, especially in the entrepreneurship world. The other story I'd like to talk to you about is you've probably heard about these guys and gals over at CoLab, there's a nice article in the Rebar Report about them. A few months back, an individual reached out to us and said, hey, I noticed we've got some space available short term. I'm looking to store some of my photography equipment. I'm looking to keep some of my video equipment. I need a place to put it. He said, sure. We'll ask the landlord to see what he says and if it works out, great. Well, the landlord said yes and this individual then had his stuff there, started talking to some of the other community members, did a presentation and put a post on a photography website where he said, hey, I'm interested in building a cyclorama. I'd like people to come check this out if you're interested and I'm gonna talk a little bit about my plans and what I'm trying to do. So they came, 10 people. Corey gave a pitch and explained to them what he was trying to do, explained to them the membership, how that would work, it'd be $200, what was gonna be included, so on and so forth. All 10 said yes and they paid. So now all of a sudden this idea had a little more backing behind it, so to speak. So he built out the cyclorama and they had the tools they needed and they were off to the races. He went from one space to three spaces to six spaces and now he's at the point in time where more than likely he'll outgrill that space and hopefully have proved his business model enough where it warrants him moving into his own space long term. Again, increasing the probability that his business is gonna succeed, learning cheaper, utilizing some resources that weren't being leveraged before. Well, what does that mean for San Antonio? So we're very lucky right now and the state that the city's in with the leadership that we have. Councilman Trevino, Councilman Warwick, Councilman Nuremberg, the city have been very supportive in our efforts to try to figure out what we can do on the collaborative front because I'm a firm believer that if you want things to happen well, you stimulate collaboration and if you want things to happen quickly, you stimulate competition. San Antonio historically has had a lot of internal competition. So now with the resources that are being provided and the encouragement from the city, we've been able to see that there's some opportunity here. You're looking at D1, this was a couple hundred properties privately owned that are vacant, part of the vacancy program here in downtown. Well, we've gotta figure out a way to activate these spaces. It's not our decision on the tech front and space cadet to decide what goes there, but if we manage the platform where people can see what's available, they can have their own ideas for what they wanna put there, what they wanna try. And if it's short-term, it's less risk for them, they can figure it out and hopefully that brings some more eyes and ears and mouths to those properties, gives them a chance to have their business work and provides the landlord some more individuals who could potentially take the property long-term, i.e. rent that property or buy that property. Well, it's not District 1 that you're seeing this in. I mean, Graham earlier talked about an urban core and a startup ecosystem. Well, District 2. The city owns roughly, I think it's 400 vacant properties there in District 2. It's a part of town that's growing substantially right now and there's a lot of vacancy there that the city has control over. Again, space cadet's not here to say what shouldn't shouldn't go there, but when we have individuals like with what Mitch and Local Sprout are doing on the urban agriculture front, right? We've got the Housing Association looking to train people how to be farmers. Well, what if they could then, after learning how to do these things, go and get a property short-term to try out their model, what everybody is they wanna do. And the city could generate some revenue from those properties and they get feedback from the community directly based on what people are trying. So, what's next? Well, we're just in the very, very, very beginning of all this and for us at Space Cadet, we're trying to figure out how do we bring these properties to light? How do we let people know what's available? And then how do we walk people through so that they can not only try those businesses, but once they're ready to grow and move forward, where do we send them so that they can continue to have resources and mentoring, find funding if necessary, and so on and so forth so that we start to build that startup ecosystem so that it's a startup community by founders, for founders, if you will, because that's how startup communities are catalyzed. It's gotta be the people that are on the ground in the trenches. So, things to take away from this is take a look at the vacancy. I mean, you can see what's there and approach your councilman. It's not just companies like Space Cadet, there's also, it was mentioned, Mask Venture is a way that the community is actually funding those projects. It's a crowdfunding platform. So there's a bunch of different opportunities. What we need are these conversations where people can say, here's what I think, what do you think? Here's what I can do, what do you need help at? And if we do that, if we collaborate, if we work together, then we will have some more innovation, we will have some more progression, and disruption won't necessarily mean displacement. Thank you, Stephen. And now we'll have a presentation from Peter French. Let's see. Afternoon, everybody. We're all still awake? Partially? Yeah. Mostly? Let's see, are these things down here? Which one is me? Peter, that's me. So it was suggested that we engage in some laugh yoga. That's not it. Where's David Clear? Is he not here? What was the, there was a proposal at any rate. I'm going to lead you through some breathing exercises that make you giggle. You can just giggle on your own. We can skip the breathing exercises, but we were encouraged to keep you all on your toes and that this is supposed to be a health conscious event. I'm going to pick up on several of the themes that we've touched on and hit a few others. So I'm Peter French, happy to be here. Tweet at me, I'll tweet you back. So being connected, creating connected communities, this is an element of human nature and the desire to be connected to other people that will not change. What I'm going to touch on is the growth of the sharing economy and its role in transforming the built environment and the distinction between what technology is capable of and isn't capable of. So human nature, not changing, human behavior, if you get all the ingredients just right, may change. Each of you has this experience every day. There are things you want to do that you maybe don't do. That's a behavior issue. It's not a nature issue. There's nothing wrong with you per se for having that extra donut or that extra cup of coffee. There might be a behavior issue that you'd like to change. You are capable of changing it. Are you motivated to change it? So technology, when well deployed, is enabling people at scale to change behavior, encouraging them with the right mixture of sticks or carrots, depending on which way you look at it, to do things differently. The mayor, and this was a great sort of foundation for this talk this morning about the 300-year-old code that dictated how San Antonio was built. And frankly, it was the code that dictated how the world was built up until less than 100 years ago when we decided that cars were so awesome that they should supersede everything that happens in the built environment. And we believed we were doing it for the sake of freedom. We believe that personal liberty was tied to our ability to jump in our own vehicle and go everywhere, and that by having this large, gracious space that somehow our lives would be improved, but the history of humanity does not bear that out. And we'll talk about how we can, each of us, interact with new technologies that enable us to get past that trap. So I'd like you all to take a quick look. You'll be familiar with some of these, maybe not so much with others, but I'm just gonna jump through a couple of them. A few other points to make about this list. And so the sharing economy impacts our lives in many, many different ways. So Amazon, the A with the arrow under there, it's one of the oldest, and in fact, maybe as I look through here, definitely the oldest company on this list that's founded in 1994, so not really old in the grand scheme of things, but you juxtapose that to Uber or Airbnb, large companies now with multi-billion dollar valuations that were established less than a decade ago that have transformed life in urban cities and in many different ways. So I'm just gonna run a few of these things, talk about what they're doing and how they're transforming or have the capability to transform our lives. So Uber, we understand what Uber is, car sharing, right? So you need to get somewhere, you don't have to own the car, you don't have to own the network, you have to own a device that gets you to the internet, so you can call somebody who already owns a car, who would like to take you where you're going. Lift, obviously in the same boat, something that you all might be slightly less from very with is, where is it on this deal? Turro, the black box. So that used to be called relay rides. So over spring break, my family and I went to Hawaii, which was a lot of fun. I rented a minivan from a very nice gentleman through Turro. So I rented his car, instead of going to Hertz, it cost me half, I met him at his house, he gave me the keys, my insurance and his insurance came together, it was a great experience, literally less than half of what I would have paid to a normal rental car. And here's a funny story, I took an Uber to get to my Turro and the Uber driver was appalled that someone would rent their car out. So I found this really kind of ironic that the Uber driver who's driving me in his car was like, who would ever rent their car to somebody? That's a terrible idea, he's like, I know what I do to rental cars, I destroy them. By the way, my Uber driver was also a golf pro who, and we were on Oahu, he was gonna be coming to San Antonio a few weeks later to walk the next USAA golf course, to meet with them. So I mean, here's a guy, again, just what do these economies do to us? It enables us to do pretty much whatever we want to do. How much free time do you have that you'd like to deploy to something else? A show of hands who's taken an Uber in the audience? You talk to your driver, I always do. I've had some really interesting experiences. Several of the old guys who've driven me around, it's golf money. They're driving Uber in the morning so they have money to play golf. I've had a retired firefighter who told me that sometimes he has to impersonate a police officer to get drunk Uber riders out of his car. But you hear these really remarkable experiences but the point is, we can monetize any minute. This is a behavior issue, not a nature issue, but the sharing technologies here, and I'm gonna touch on more of them, enable us to really facilitate having the kind of life that we want. And this is gonna be important when it comes time to talk about the built environment. X Prize, I'm gonna come back to that. Airbnb, you all know Airbnb. Who stayed in Airbnb? Anyone? Here you go. So again, there's over 300 Airbnbs in San Antonio. I don't know what the worldwide count is but obviously it enables you and this is Space Cadet and we'll touch on Steven. I've got a room, I've got a couch, I've got a building. I'd like to monetize that. It's just sitting here, maybe I could make some money there. And then what people do with that experience and how people relate that experience and the comfort we've now gotten in sharing things with folks, I think is restoring social equity even though because the way the United States has been built over the last 100 years, it is physically more disconnected than it's ever been. The internet and the sharing economy enables us to reestablish these connections. And you're seeing, again, this is a human nature, not a human behavior issue, but we're desperate for it. And that's why this list of companies here, I believe is going to continue to grow. Where is WeWork? Okay, Geekdom WeWork, so co-working. Co-working has become a hot commodity. There were two new co-working spaces announced just this week in San Antonio, the Workery, very cool new space and the Perch. And actually we haven't announced it yet but we'll be launching a third before the end of the year on Houston Street, the Entrepreneur's Center of San Antonio. But in 2005, there was one co-working space in the United States. That number has more than doubled every year. There are now about 12,000 co-working spaces worldwide. There are, I'm sorry, there's 12, yeah, there's 1,200 in the United States, about 12,000 worldwide. Again, sharing, office space, homes, cars, even not even having to own a car, all these things are a tsunami of change that comes to what has been a non-disrupted market, which is real estate. So it was touched on earlier, but I'll give you this statement that Andres Andohar gave to me, which I find is an interesting point. And he said, when he started school, forms still followed function in the design realm. He said, by the time he finished, form followed financing. And I think we were all familiar with the really kind of terrible outcome that we can only get built what was built before.