Facing housing issues? Google's secretive think tank comes to your rescue

As of 2016, there are 7.4 billion people on the planet, reports Tech In Asia

When you hear the word Google, you first associate it with search. When you disagree with someone over a fact, Google it. You want to know where to go on vacation, Google it. You want to know what a company does, Google it.

To date, the only company to ever come out of X and spun out into a separate entity is Flux. I spoke with Jen Carlile, a co-founder of Flux, who initially joined Google as a software engineer in 2010.

The housing crisis

The Industrial Revolution caused massive migrations from the countryside to cities where factories were located. The result of these massive migrations? By 1900, 14 per cent of the world’s population was living in cities. In 1950, that number went up to 30 per cent. And then in 2008, for the first time in the history of the world, the percentage of people living in cities equalled the percentage of people who lived outside of them.

Here’s where it gets interesting. As of 2016, there are 7.4 billion people on the planet. 2.2 billion people are expected to join us by 2050, and 90 per cent of this growth is expected to take place in cities.

It’s really hard to make sense of what the building challenge will look like to house 2 billion people. Jen delivered a keynote address in 2015 at the Design Modeling Symposium in Copenhagen where she suggested that we visualize this population problem by considering the number of new buildings we need to house them. 

Here’s my math on the new buildings we would need. If we assume that each apartment contains four people, and each new building has an average of 50 apartments, then we would need to build 495 million new apartment buildings over the next 33 years to house all of these people. This equates to the construction of 822 buildings per day, every day, for the next 33 years—no days off, no vacations. Venture capitalists, are you listening? Now that’s what we call a well-sized market opportunity.
 

This is an excerpt from the article published on Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here