Internet access 💻, new apartments 🏢, and repair cafés ☕️

Good morning {{name!|reader}},

We’re excited to share that our new-and-improved website is finally ready. You can check it out here. Along with a better explanation of what Three Great Things is (because we know some of you were confused), there are now pages to submit your own stories, give us feedback, share the newsletter, read about our backgrounds, and of course see all the newsletters we’ve written so far. Coming soon, we’ll have your profile page equipped with referral milestones and a place to update the survey answers you initially put in (for now you can update them by resubscribing and taking the survey again).

The other big change was our rebrand: so long to the Thinker logo (maybe it’ll make a comeback in retro merch one day), and hello to the campfire logo. The brighter colors match the attitude we try to bring to the newsletter. Camp is the place we learned the value of sharing three great things from our day. Maybe it was a fun afternoon at the lake, winning a football game, or learning to cook something new. Three Great Things is that habit pointed at the world, and the logo is three logs forming the foundation of a fire. Rebuilding it all reminded us what got us doing this in the first place – expressing gratitude in our daily lives and noticing what’s going right. This week, we’re bringing you three stories where things you mostly take for granted got better.

Take your morning routine during a typical workday, for instance. It probably goes something like this: your alarm goes off. You grab your phone, turn off the alarm, then spend a few minutes responding to texts you missed overnight, catching up on the news, or just scrolling TikTok. Then you get out of your bed and get ready for the day. Finally, you pack your backpack and head out. Even in those monotonous minutes every morning, there’s plenty to be grateful for: your phone, the bed you slept on, and a working backpack to name three.

And here’s a little preview of who got those three this week: the UN reported last week 200 million more people accessed the internet versus last year, driven by the cost of data coming down. In major cities like Washington, D.C., long vacant office spaces are being converted into apartments to help fill the growing demand for housing. And one San Francisco repair café got more volunteers than it had spots for to help fix items like a busted backpack zipper for their neighbors.

With gratitude,
The 3GT Crew

With unlimited internet access, any question that pops into your head can be answered about as fast as you can ask it. Not everyone has that yet. But it’s getting closer. Last week, the UN released its global Facts and Figures data report, estimating that 6.3 billion people (76% of the world population) are using the internet this year. That's up nearly 200 million from last year and is being driven by the least developed countries, whose access grew 3 times as fast as the global rate. The reason is price: mobile data now costs about 1.2% of average monthly income worldwide. For the first time, landlocked developing countries (such as Ethiopia and Bolivia, which have no coastline, so no direct undersea cables) and small island developing states (from the Caribbean to the Pacific) met the UN’s affordability target of 2% of income.

The impact: economists Tavneet Suri (MIT) and Billy Jack (Georgetown) measured what phone access did in Kenya. M-Pesa, the country’s text-message money service, lifted nearly 200,000 households out of poverty. It also helped 185,000 women move from subsistence farming into business or retail, and their savings went up. Globally, more than $2 trillion, or the entire Canadian economy, moved through mobile-money accounts last year, double the total of four years earlier.

Big picture: 97% of people now live within reach of at least a 3G signal. Cost has been the gating item keeping people offline, but it’s fallen fast. Data is cheaper now, but phones are the next hurdle. Entry-level smartphones still cost the poorest fifth of people in low- and middle-income countries nearly half of a month’s income (we’re not talking the newest iPhone here – this is a $50 Android). And it’s gotten worse: the AI boom has more than doubled the price of the memory chips inside those phones.

What’s helping: people are paying for phones by the day. M-KOPA, which sells smartphones on small daily installments, now has 10 million customers across Africa. On top of that, African carriers are testing $30-40 phones in six countries this year. Meanwhile, for the 3% outside any signal, help is on the way too. In August, Airtel Africa, one of the continent’s largest mobile operators, switched on Starlink direct-to-cell service in the Democratic Republic of Congo, letting ordinary phones send texts and WhatsApp messages anywhere with a clear view of the sky.

Of everything COVID changed, working from home was the toughest habit to break for most. Despite mass return-to-office campaigns across the corporate world, some degree of WFH stuck and offices never refilled (getting people to give up the comfort of their couches is easier said than done). That left a lot of empty buildings with loans still coming due. Because federal office demand never snapped back, the problem has been particularly bad in Washington, D.C.: office attendance has averaged under half its pre-pandemic levels.

The fix: one widely discussed idea was to turn vacant office space into apartments. For years, there was a host of architectural objections: incompatible floor plans, all the plumbing in one core, the list goes on and on. But owners were tired of waiting for the real estate slump to pass and wanted to act, so builders got to work on solutions. Floor plans were challenging because cubicles can sit far from a window – a bedroom can’t. Builders came up with three fixes. They redrew the floors so every apartment hugs the windows, cut a courtyard into the middle of the building, and put things that didn’t need windows in the dark middle (gyms, storage, mechanical rooms). For bringing water to every apartment, one contractor tucked each unit’s water heater inside its washer-dryer, freeing up a closet’s worth of space.

Between 2024 and early this year, D.C. finished 11 conversions, adding about 2,000 new apartments. The city also sweetened the deal: in March 2024, D.C. launched a 20-year property-tax break for converted buildings. This October saw the first project to open under the tax break: Aviator House, a former pilots’ union headquarters in Dupont Circle, and the home of that washer-dryer. Its 157 apartments are just about one for every seat on a Boeing 737, fittingly. The biggest project to date, the Geneva, broke ground in January and is slated to add over 500 apartments.

D.C. isn’t the only one. In New York, a 2024 zoning reform extended eligibility from pre-1961 buildings to those built through 1990. The Flatiron Building opened its doors to the first residents in its 124-year history last month. Still, there’s a housing crisis in major cities, and conversions alone won’t solve it. Even if every announced project gets built, that’s only 40% of the way to D.C.’s goal of 15,000 new residents. But in cities with no land left to build on, conversions are an unmatched way to put new homes in the heart of downtown. And more are coming: the national pipeline of office-to-apartment conversions has nearly quadrupled since 2022.

In an Ipsos poll this spring, about 60% of Americans said volunteering is an important value and that it makes a meaningful difference in their community. However, only a third said they volunteer as often as they’d like and most reported volunteering rarely (28%) or never (32%). The most cited ideas for increasing volunteering were doing it with friends and family, opportunities closer to home, and better information on how to get involved.

In September, an Instagram post asking for volunteers received over 150 applicants for 35 spots. Allie McAndrews was looking for people to help at a repair café she was spinning up in San Francisco. She was only starting it because the one she’d been volunteering at for the six months prior, Haight-Nopa Repair Café, got so popular that it couldn’t finish all its items in a day. The call for her first event was met by electricians, woodworkers, sewists, and a jeweler, among other trades. Collectively, they helped fix 59 items ranging from a food processor that had been dead for three years to a backpack’s busted strap and zipper.

Stepping back: if you’ve never heard of a repair café, you’re not alone. They’re free, volunteer-run, usually monthly events in a library or church basement where neighbors bring broken things and fixers repair them with the owner sitting alongside to learn. Started in Amsterdam in 2009, they now bring together about 1.5 million visitors worldwide across 60,000 events a year. Haight-Nopa fixed nearly 80% of items that were brought to its October event, and KQED reports most fix roughly half.

The reality: McAndrews’s fixer surplus is a local phenomenon. Across the movement, the top concern is finding enough fixers. More than half are over 60 and just 5% are under 25. One engineer put it this way: “the idea that you can fix your own stuff has receded because the skills are not being passed down.” With all the success these cafés are seeing, new ones are opening faster than fixers can sign up.

What’s next: coming up next week, a co-founder of Haight-Nopa is hosting a training teaching people how to start their own neighborhood repair café. If McAndrews’s Instagram call is any sign, the fixers are out there. Repair cafés are exactly what people say they’re looking for: close-to-home events they can do with friends and family. And all it takes is a skill they already have.

If you have a story or read one that you think we should feature, send it our way. We’d love to include it.