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• Jessica Kirshner is an interior designer who moved from Portland to Chicago in August 2023.
• She loves the affordability, walkability, and cultural vibrancy, despite a higher cost of living.
• Kirshner intends to stay in Chicago for a few years before planning a move to Europe.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jessica Kirshner, a 26-year-old interior designer in Chicago. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I'm originally from the Bay Area, and I moved to Eugene, Oregon, in 2015 to study interior architecture. When I graduated, I moved to Portland for a job at a large firm.

After three years in Portland, I moved to Chicago in August 2023. I wanted to live in a bigger but still affordable city, and I'm familiar with the area because I have family here. I live 10 minutes from downtown, and I love it.

Affordability and job market

Chicago is affordable compared to other big cities like LA, San Diego, the Bay Area, or New York.

The biggest difference I noticed from Oregon to Illinois was the income tax because Oregon's is high. The pay is definitely better in Chicago, but the cost of living is higher here, too, so it evens out.

When I first moved, I kept my Oregon-based job and worked remotely for seven months. Once I started looking, it took me about two months to find a new job in Chicago.

For my interior design profession, there were many options in Chicago. It was also good timing for me because Portland had very few options. I tried to use LinkedIn but ultimately found my job through a friend.

I now work as an interior designer at a large international firm. I wanted to work somewhere with offices worldwide because I eventually want to move to Europe.

Quality of life

My dad is from Chicago, so I came here often while growing up.

After living in Oregon for eight years, I missed my family, but I didn't want to move back to the Bay Area just because it's so expensive. I also wanted a bigger Jewish community, and Chicago is a good option for that.

I love how lively Chicago is during the summer, with everyone out and about. I went to an air and water show last summer, and everyone was out on the lake all day long. It was so fun to people-watch.

I love the architecture, too. It's great to walk around all the different neighborhoods and see the diversity in the buildings.

Culture and walkability

I'm never really bored here. When I first moved, I joined a kickball league to meet people. I'm taking a sewing class because I want to make my own clothes. I plan to apply for German citizenship soon, so I'm going to enroll in German classes.

I didn't know anyone except my family, but making friends has been easy. I've mainly met people through work, organizations like IIDA, and reconnecting with college and high school friends who I knew lived here.

I chose an apartment that's within walking distance from grocery stores. I found it online and didn't see it before signing the lease, but I watched a 3D walkthrough. The cost of a one-bedroom apartment here is similar to a two-bedroom in Portland.

There's a mall, many shops, and outdoor areas within a five-minute walk from me. I'm near bars, clubs, restaurants, and whatever I want to do. I didn't want to have to rely on a car anymore, and as a pedestrian, it's very easy to get around.

I plan to stay for a while

My worst experience was my first time seeing a rat. You don't see rats on the street in Portland. I clearly haven't had any really bad experiences if that's the worst that's happened to me so far.

One downside is the biking culture is kind of nonexistent. There are bikes you can rent through an app, but there are no bike lanes and it feels almost dangerous to bike here, which was quite shocking to me coming from Portland.

I feel like I can do anything I want here. I moved halfway across the country, so I will probably stay here for a few years before moving to Europe when the time is right.

I love Chicago. I'm 100% sure I made the right decision, and I'm happier than I was in Oregon.

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• Mohammad Alnobani co-founded a tech startup in the West Bank in 2022.
• Six months into the Israeli-Hamas war in nearby Gaza, Alnobani and his cofounder are relocating to escape the conflict.
• Alnobani said he did not regret founding his company in his homeland and hopes to return someday.

This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Mohammad Alnobani, 34, who cofounded "The Middle Frame," a tech startup based in Ramallah, a city in the Palestinian Territories. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

At around 1 a.m. on October 7, I arrived in Amman, Jordan, on the way back to my home in Jerusalem from a trip to Belfast, where I attended the One Young World Summit.

I met my CTO at the airport; they were traveling to Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the West Bank. We'd decided to travel together to the borders, which opened at 8 a.m.

We got into a bus that was supposed to move between Jordan and Israel at around 8.30 a.m. Then, we were told they were closing the borders. We started checking the news. I read that Hamas got through a fence surrounding Gaza.

I was nervous as hell — whether you're pro-Palestine or pro-Israel, once you hear a major event is happening in the region, you know what's coming next is not going to be good.

We got off the bus and went back to Amman. We didn't know what to do.

I founded a tech startup in Ramallah in 2022

I was born in Saudi Arabia but grew up in Jordan. My mom is from Nablus, a city in the West Bank, and my dad grew up in Jerusalem. I moved to Jerusalem at 16 and went to university in Ramallah. After living in Qatar and London, I moved back to Jerusalem in 2019 and set up an advertising agency with my brother in 2020, which I was a part of until January 2022.

In February 2022, I set up "The Middle Frame," a stock image platform, with my business partner Raya, a photographer I met in Boston during an entrepreneurship fellowship in 2021.

Raya told me she wanted to build a platform for authentic stock images from the Middle East and North Africa.

I knew where Raya was coming from. Back when I worked in advertising, creatives always struggled to find images that accurately represented local cultures from Arab regions on international platforms like Shutterstock and Getty Images.

Over 1,800 contributors are signed up on our platform. Photographers upload their own images, which we moderate.

The Palestinian startup scene

Our business is based in Ramallah, where Raya lives. We're both familiar with the city; it's where I went to university, and half of my family lives there. It made sense cost-wise for us to work locally and set up our business there.

The Palestinian startup community is very small. I think a lot of people around the world don't know it exists. It's very easy to get into and it felt like a good environment to find our feet.

I knew there was almost no political and economic stability in the area, but as it was my home country, I felt like I had to try and do my part. If starting a company in Ramallah could benefit the community by creating jobs and further building on the small startup scene there, we wanted to try.

We wanted to onboard Palestinian team members to give them experience in a tech startup, but we had been struggling to recruit people due to the ongoing conflict.

Myself and Raya are the only two working full-time for "The Middle Frame," but we have a part-time CTO and web developer who are both Palestinian, as well as six part-timers in Egypt.

As a stock image platform, we wanted to provide local photographers with passive income from sharing their images.

We're targeting advertising agencies and media outlets that can download our images, but since the Palestinian population and market are small, we felt there was a limitation on our growth and scalability. Only a handful of companies and publications would be using the images.

Since the startup community is also small, there aren't as many opportunities to collaborate with other startups or gain knowledge from them. There's only one VC, and there aren't any mature startup accelerators.

We planned to expand into a bigger market eventually.

We were determined to keep working despite the uncertainties caused by the conflict

During the first week after the events of October 7, I was checking the news every day. Waking up was a struggle. People living in Europe and the US invited me to healing circles, but I wasn't ready to talk about the situation yet.

On October 9, I got on a call with Raya, who was with her family in Ramallah, and our CTO, who was with me in Jordan, to discuss the next steps. We had been running small testing advertising campaigns for "The Middle Frame" and were supposed to start larger campaigns in October, but we decided that, ethically speaking, it didn't feel right. We stopped our advertising efforts until February.

We took a screenshot of the call as a statement that we will keep working even in the toughest times. When "The Middle Frame" goes through a hard time in the future, we can look back at that screenshot.

Raya and I talked about the possibility of her moving to Jordan, but she said it wouldn't be easy — her kids and husband have their lives in Ramallah — and the conversation didn't go anywhere at the time.

We're thinking about the people dying and the struggles that our people are facing. Being in the media industry, we're documenting life in the region. It's not easy for us to ignore what's happening.

We know other startup cofounders from Gaza whose office buildings were bombed and who have officially stopped working. A cofounder who I met in Jordan just last year was killed — it was the toughest news I'd ever received in my life.

We're now planning to relocate to the UAE

During Israel's war on Gaza that followed the October 7 attack, the whole Palestinian economy faced the consequences. Middle Frame sales had halted completely in the area.

Due to the situation, I've been on the road travelling. Since October, I've been in Egypt, Dubai, Jerusalem and Ramallah. I was in Jordan until the end of January, and we initially decided to focus our efforts on the Jordanian market. I met with potential clients, like advertising and news agencies, and pitched to potential investors.

We don't know what the future holds. We took a risk by operating in Ramallah for nearly two years, but we knew we should acknowledge that there was no more room for growth and no longer risk our investors' money in a market filled with uncertainty.

Recently, Israeli settler attacks in the West Bank have been very frequent. In mid-April, I was returning from a wedding and got stuck in a village for hours because the settlers were blocking the road. That was the same night Iran fired on Israel; it really hit me that we can't stay here.

We've been discussing whether we're willing to relocate. We know that the UAE and Saudi Arabia are bigger markets, and we think the UAE — where I believe there's a very diverse business market — would be the best place for us to go.

We're waiting on news from a local investor, but Raya, our CTO, and I hope to relocate at the end of this year. Luckily, Raya's husband is understanding and open to moving.

We hope to return in the future

If I had started "The Middle Frame" anywhere else, we might have been able to grow faster and raise more investments, but I don't regret what we did.

In the future, when our business is stable in a different market, we could maybe have a smaller operation in the Palestinian market.

The Palestinian startup ecosystem needs more examples of successful startups in the wider region to support the startups in Palestine and more investment bodies to support the early-stage startups.

Because the Palestinian startup community is so small, we've had to get on calls with investors and startup founders from other countries to get support and advice; it's pushed us to make connections internationally and it's made us more resilient.

However, taking a minute to zoom out and look at the big picture is important. Some days, you wake up to a news story that is painful to see and hear, making your day 10 times harder to work through.

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• A new report says China's $229 billion military budget in 2022 was actually equivalent to $711 billion.
• A similar figure was touted by lawmakers last year when they cited US intelligence estimates.
• The report, by think tank AEI, breaks down that figure to show where China's money is likely going to.

In June 2023, Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska warned Congress that China's military was catching up to America's faster than previously imagined.

The US intelligence community, the Republican senator said, estimated that Beijing spent an equivalent of $700 billion on its defense budget in 2022 — more than triple its reported topline of $229 billion.

Sullivan's legislative push to dig further into the matter came amid renewed interest in China's true military budget, with think tanks and observers running their own analyses of Beijing's coffers.

A new report published Monday by the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute seeks to break down how the US might have internally reached that $700 billion estimation for 2022.

The report's author, Mackenzie Eaglen, writes that the Chinese budget is worth about $711 billion when weighed against America's, slightly higher than the one quoted in June by Sullivan.

That makes Beijing's spending in 2022 "nearly equal" to the US defense budget of about $740 billion that year, wrote Eaglen, a senior fellow at AEI.

"Considering that the Pentagon has labeled China the 'pacing challenge,' this revelation should cause concern," Eaglen wrote.

She mostly pieced together the new figure by comparing older Chinese budget reports and spending breakdowns, extrapolating them onto the $229 billion Beijing announced.

That's because Chinese spending reports are kept tightly under wraps. Most US observers haven't been able to pin the $700 billion on hard evidence.

Understanding $711 billion

Notably, the $711 billion estimate listed by Eaglen doesn't mean that China is spending that exact amount of money on defense. Rather, it describes the purchasing power of its military budget compared to America's, especially considering lower wage and material costs in China.

Based on a 2020 Chinese report to the United Nations, Eaglen wrote that China's 2022 military spending was likely divided into three major categories: equipment, training and maintenance, and personnel.

With purchasing power parity factored in, China likely spent the US equivalent of $135 billion instead of $85 billion on equipment and $121 billion instead of $76 billion on training and maintenance, the report said.

But the biggest jump comes from Eaglen's estimation of Chinese military wages, which typically aren't publicly recorded.

"Labor costs are demonstrably cheaper in China, where soldiers are paid just one-sixteenth the wage of a US Army infantryman," Eaglen wrote in an opinion piece for The Hill.

In her report, she compared the average wages of US and Chinese government workers and found that the former are paid 4.31 times as much as their counterparts in China.

Using that factor, Eaglen wrote that it's highly likely China's spending on personnel that year was worth $293 billion of US military spending.

Then there's research and development, which the US said China doesn't account for in its military budget announcements. Eaglen estimated that China spent about $45 billion on R&D, based on the country saying it spent that amount on research in "nondisclosed agencies."

The rest of the total budget comes from significant expenses listed by China as non-military, but ones that Eaglen argued should be considered defense spending.

She wrote that one such expense was $45 billion for maintaining the People's Armed Police, a paramilitary organization focused on internal security but tasked with bolstering the People's Liberation Army's ranks in times of crisis.

Another $45 billion was spent on retirement, military pensions, and demobilization, $2 billion on China's Coast Guard, and $21 billion on space forces — which Eaglen calculated for growth based on an official 2013 Chinese budget of $10.8 billion for space.

"Equal defense spending between the United States and China plays to Beijing's benefit," Eaglen wrote, noting that the US defense budget is spread across various theaters worldwide while China focuses on only one region.

The researcher called on the US to provide transparency on its findings about China's military spending power, citing concerns that the "American public is too often at ease in believing the US military remains ahead of all its competitors."

US military spending is also often cited as higher than the actual defense budget. Some estimates for 2023 are as high as $1.4 trillion when factoring in costs like veterans affairs spending, homeland security, security for international affairs, and interest accrued from debt.

Meanwhile, the US in March passed a bill allocating $825 billion to the American defense budget in 2024, the smallest proportion of its GDP since World War II. In the same month, China announced a military budget of $231 billion for the year.

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• Former President Donald Trump says he didn't fall asleep during his hush-money trial in Manhattan.
• Trump says he closes his "beautiful blue eyes, sometimes" so that he can "listen intensely." 
• The trial, which began on April 15, is expected to take about six weeks.

Former President Donald Trump says he didn't fall asleep during his hush-money trial.

Multiple reporters from outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, and The Washington Post have published reports noting that Trump appeared to doze off during his first criminal trial.

Trump has been regularly appearing in a Manhattan court since the trial kicked off on April 15. He is accused of falsifying business records to cover up a sexual affair with the porn star Stormy Daniels.

But the reports of him snoozing, Trump says, aren't true at all.

"Contrary to the FAKE NEWS MEDIA, I don't fall asleep during the Crooked D.A.'s Witch Hunt, especially not today," Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Thursday. "I simply close my beautiful blue eyes, sometimes, listen intensely, and take it ALL in!!!"

Trump's remarks come just a day after The Times' Maggie Haberman told CNN's Kaitlan Collins that it is "100 percent true" that he was sleeping at some points during his trial.

Haberman, however, did acknowledge that there were times where Trump really was just closing his eyes.

"That is how he tries to just basically stay calm and deal with it. And whether that then leads to sleep or whatever, who knows?" Haberman said. "But he is sitting there with his eyes closed for long periods of time. It's not always sleeping."

This isn't the first time the Trump campaign has refuted reports of him catching some shut-eye while in court. A representative for his campaign said in a statement to The Independent last month that the reports are "100% Fake News."

But that hasn't deterred people from cracking jokes at Trump's expense.

"Imagine committing so many crimes, you get bored at your own trial," Jon Stewart, the host of "The Daily Show," said of Trump during an episode that aired on April 15.

Besides the case in Manhattan, Trump has been charged in three other criminal cases, including a state criminal case in Georgia over accusations that he attempted to overturn the 2020 election results.

The former president is also on the line for two federal cases: one relating to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and another where he's accused of hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving office.

None of the three cases have firm trial dates set yet.

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• Novo Nordisk said it will cut prices of Wegovy amid rising sales and competition.
• Sales of the blockbuster drug more than doubled in the first quarter year-on-year.
• Novo faces competition from Eli Lilly and scrutiny from the US government over drug pricing.

Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk will lower prices of its weight loss drug Wegovy as it plans to raise sales volumes and navigate tough competition.

Prices for the blockbuster drug fell in the first quarter. The company plans to continue to cut prices in the US because of high volume and competition, chief financial officer Karsten Munk Knudsen said on the company's Thursday earnings call.

Sales of Wegovy more than doubled in the first quarter year-on-year, to 9.4 billion Danish crowns, or $1.3 billion, according to the company's earnings. In the US, more than 25,000 new patients are starting the drug weekly, compared to 5,000 in the beginning of the year, Knudsen said.

Knudsen and CEO Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen said on the earnings call that they're prioritizing accessibility to Wegovy, instead of keeping prices high — despite significant demand at current costs. They did not specify how much Novo plans to cut Wegovy's prices.

The Danish pharmaceutical maker, which also produces viral weight loss drug Ozempic, reported better-than-expected sales of 65 billion Danish crowns, or $9.4 billion, in the first quarter. The company also raised forecasts for 2024 and said it expects to sales to grow between 19% and 27%.

The Wegovy price cuts come as Novo faces competition from US rival, Eli Lilly, which also posted earnings this week and reported a 26% increase in revenue in the first quarter. Eli Lilly said that revenue growth was driven by Ozempic and Wegovy competitors Mounjaro and Zepbound, which are used to treat Type 2 diabetes and obesity, respectively.

Novo's pricing for Ozempic and Wegovy has come under recent political scrutiny. Last week, US Senator Bernie Sanders launched an investigation looking into "the outrageously high prices" Novo charges for both drugs in the US, which he said were much higher than in other countries.

Wegovy and similar weight-loss drugs have become a huge business. With the US adult obesity rate at around 40%, the drugs could be prescribed to 15 million Americans in the next few years, per a 2023 Goldman Sachs report. The bank estimated that the anti-obesity drug market to grow to $100 billion by 2030.

The highly-coveted drugs are being snagged by celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk, and Charles Barkley. They are also gaining popularity with people who are going out of their way to afford them.

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• City Storage Systems' restaurant tech arm cut staff this week, including more than 80 in the US.
• Otter, which runs a number of software and hardware businesses, is seeking profitability.
• Otter has $80 million in annual recurring revenue and continues to grow, an executive said on Thursday.

Six months after layoffs at food technology company City Storage Systems, another round of cuts hit teams globally, per leaked audio obtained by Business Insider.

More than 80 US employees were cut at Otter, the company's restaurant tech arm, said a source familiar with the people laid off. Layoffs also affected teams in Canada and Latin America, among other regions.

Otter head Guido Gabrielli told staff in an all-hands meeting on Thursday that Otter made the cuts because the company is "trying to get profitable as soon as possible," per audio obtained by Business Insider. He said leaders would "try our best" to avoid future layoffs.

The total number of staff affected was not immediately apparent. CSS employs about 3,300 people — down from about 4,300 in November, before the last significant layoffs.

A representative for CSS did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside normal business hours.

In fall 2021, CEO Travis Kalanick raised $850 million for CSS from investors including Microsoft, at a $15 billion valuation. Since then, the company has faced similar headwinds to the rest of the tech and real estate industries, including higher interest rates and slower customer demand growth than during the pandemic boom.

Through CSS, Kalanick wants to reinvent the business of food, just as he upended transportation by founding Uber. CSS's other big unit is CloudKitchens, which renovates warehouses into ghost kitchen facilities for mom-and-pop restaurateurs and big companies like Chick-fil-A.

CSS's chief financial officer left in January, BI previously reported.

Otter is still growing

At Thursday's all-hands, Gabrielli said the company has notched $80 million in annual recurring revenue and has 100,000 restaurants paying for at least one service.

"Growth is not something very common today in the SaaS world and in the tech world and we still have it," Gabrielli said.

Otter's business includes order management for platforms like DoorDash; a virtual menu arm; a revenue recapture business, which claws back money owed to restaurants; and a newer point of sale system.

Gabrielli said Otter has about 500 McDonald's customers for its revenue recapture business. That product faces increased competition and slowing growth, he said.

Otter's point-of-sale system "is doing fantastic" for its small size, with about half a million dollars in revenue annually.

Otter's leaders have also talked with tech companies that are trying to raise money, Gabrielli said. Some companies that notched billion-dollar valuations two years ago — at the height of zero interest rate-catalyzed investor enthusiasm — are now struggling with a year of no growth, he said.

Do you have a story to share? Reach out to this reporter using a nonwork phone on Signal and Telegram at 646 768 1627.

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• Students protesting Israel's war on Gaza may be ruining their career prospects, says Kevin O'Leary.
• The "Shark Tank" host said employers could identify applicants who joined in the protests using AI.
• "I can't believe the stuff I find in background checks now. These people are screwed," he said.

"Shark Tank" host and investor Kevin O'Leary says pro-Palestinian student protesters will be "screwed" when they start job hunting.

This, O'Leary says, is because employers can now use AI technology to screen applicants and filter out those who have taken part in protests. Advancements in technology have made it much easier to identify people on camera, the businessman added.

"Here's your resume with a picture of you burning a flag. See that one. That goes in this pile over here, cause I can get the same person's talent in this pile that's not burning anything," O'Leary told Fox News' The Five on Wednesday.

"There's plenty of consequences for all those people. Even an image that far away, AI can generate who they are by the way the body moves. I can't believe the stuff I find in background checks now. These people are screwed," he said.

O'Leary told CNN in an interview on the same day that protesters could still be identified even if they tried to mask their identity by donning a mask. This is because they can be identified via retinal scanning, he claimed.

"This is what's happening with AI. So if you're burning down something, or taking a flag down, or fighting with police, I'm sorry, you're trashing your personal brand," O'Leary told CNN's Laura Coates.

Representatives for O'Leary did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

O'Leary isn't the only business executive who has weighed in on the pro-Palestinian student protests taking place at various campuses, such as Columbia University and UCLA.

Darren Woods, the CEO of Exxon Mobil, told CNBC in an interview last month that the oil giant "wouldn't be interested" in hiring students from universities that have been embroiled in pro-Palestinian protests.

"Harassment and intimidation, there's no place for that, frankly at those universities, and certainly no place for that at a company like Exxon Mobil," Woods told the outlet. "If that action or those protests reflect the values of the campuses where they're doing it, we wouldn't be interested in recruiting students from those campuses."

Comments from executives like O'Leary and Woods underscore the damage students might be inflicting on their own careers through their political activism.

In October, law firm Winston & Strawn said it revoked a job offer for a New York University law student who publicly condemned Israel for Hamas' terrorist attacks. The announcement came on October 10, just three days after Hamas had attacked Israel.

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• NATO is accusing Russia of "malign activities" in its member states, including Germany and the UK.
• The alliance said this includes sabotage, acts of violence, and disinformation campaigns.
• The North Atlantic Council said it "will act individually and collectively to address these actions."

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Thursday singled out Russia in a statement condemning "recent malign activities" in its member states.

"This includes sabotage, acts of violence, cyber and electronic interference, disinformation campaigns, and other hybrid operations," the North Atlantic Council statement said.

The council said it made its statement amid investigations and charges against people accused of hostile state activity in Czechia, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and the UK.

The treaty organization said these individuals' actions were part of an "intensifying campaign of activities" carried out by Russia.

"We will act individually and collectively to address these actions, and will continue to coordinate closely," the statement added.

It further condemned Russia for its accused behavior and called on Moscow to uphold international obligations.

"Russia's actions will not deter Allies from continuing to support Ukraine," the statement read.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 — which the Kremlin has billed as a response to NATO aggression — has widened the rift between Moscow and its Western rivals.

The US-led alliance has provided Ukraine with some $168 billion in aid, now bolstered by a new tranche of $61 billion from the US. About $125 billion of this total includes advanced weaponry and ammunition, with NATO states saying Ukraine's defeat would be devastating for Europe's overall security.

The divide has also long been clear in NATO's rhetoric toward Russia. French President Emmanuel Macron, for example, has for months said that he would not rule out sending troops to Ukraine should Russia make significant advances on the battlefield.

Meanwhile, Russia says the alliance has effectively waged war against Moscow by sending aid to Kyiv.

Amid the heightened tensions, NATO members have increasingly highlighted what they say are Russian clandestine activities in their own governments and institutions.

The European Parliament in March said it was investigating lawmakers accused of being on the payroll of a Russian propaganda network busted in Czechia.

In late April, two British men in their early 20s were charged by UK authorities and accused of helping Russian intelligence services in a suspected arson attack in London.

Meanwhile, Germany has arrested six people accused of spying for Russia and China.

Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours by Business Insider.

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• Jan Sramek, CEO of California Forever, wants to build a new city in Solano County, California.
• He said he hopes to provide more affordable housing with the new city.
• The recent "AI boom" will only make the housing crisis worse, Sramek told Kara Swisher.

The leader behind the grand plans to build a new city in Northern California believes his project will address the state's ongoing housing crisis — a matter he says will only get worse with the recent demand for artificial intelligence.

Jan Sramek, CEO of California Forever, which is a company backed by Silicon Valley's wealthiest, made his case for the new Solano County city during an episode of the podcast "On With Kara Swisher" on Tuesday.

Sramek said in the interview that his vision for the city, which would be about 60 miles away from San Francisco, is simple: to build a more walkable, dense city that is also affordable.

Previously published information from California Forever revealed that the city will be about 18,600 acres with a capacity to welcome 400,000 residents.

Sramek said on the podcast that the city could have homes or apartments starting at $400,000. The average home value in Solano County is about $590,000, according to Zillow.

The ex-Goldman Sachs trader-turned-City Founder said he has no interest in building a smart city or a libertarian utopia, but instead wants to address a persistent problem in the Golden State that is quality, affordable housing.

More than 800,00 people left California between 2021 and 2022, according to Census Bureau data. The high cost of living was one factor former California residents cited to Business Insider last year for their exodus.

A 49-unit apartment complex that is taking 17 years to build has become one recent example of the housing issue in the state.

"These walkable communities today — working families can't afford them," Sramek said.

The CEO later added that the housing problem will only get worse with the advancement of artificial intelligence, arguing that this problem makes his project more necessary.

"If the AI boom continues and the salaries continue in the Bay Area — that's going to just increase the pressure on the housing market," he said. "And it's going to be harder and harder and harder for working families to stay in San Francisco or in Palo Alto."

Sramek didn't elaborate on what role artificial intelligence will play in the housing crisis. A California Forever spokesperson didn't address the question in an emailed response to Business Insider.

One investigation by The Lever revealed that landlords could use AI to screen potential tenants, potentially opening the door for discrimination against people even with minor convictions such as littering.

But Sramek appeared to be suggesting that AI will have an impact on wages — higher salaries to attract top talent, for example — and, as a result, on people's ability to afford housing.

A blog from the International Monetary Fund stated that AI could result create a split between workers who can take advantage of AI and those who cannot.

"We may see polarization within income brackets, with workers who can harness AI seeing an increase in their productivity and wages—and those who cannot, falling behind," the IMF forum said. "Research shows that AI can help less experienced workers enhance their productivity more quickly. Younger workers may find it easier to exploit opportunities, while older workers could struggle to adapt."

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• Apple reported better-than-expected sales in China in its latest earnings, including the iPhone.
• Still, CEO Tim Cook believes there's still "work to do" in bolstering sales to its major market.
• "I think it has been and is the most competitive market in the world," Cook said regarding China.

Apple CEO Tim Cook says there's still more work to do on the China front.

Apple reported in its second-quarter earnings that the company saw better-than-expected sales in China, a major market, which has been a source of concern for investors worried about a slowdown.

While overall iPhone sales were down 10% year-over-year, CEO Cook noted that Apple "still saw some growth" on iPhone in China, specifying that "two best-selling smartphones in urban China" are the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro Max. That growth may come as a surprise to investors, as Counterpoint Research reported earlier this year that iPhone sales to China fell by 24% in the first six weeks of 2024 amid competition from local rivals like Huawei.

Still, Cook noted that there's "clearly work there to do" in bolstering sales of other products like the iPad to one of Apple's biggest markets.

"I think it has been and is the most competitive market in the world," Cook said on Apple's latest earnings call. "I believe it was last quarter as well."

Nevertheless, the CEO told investors that he continues to feel "very optimistic" about the China market, citing better economic conditions in the region as a driving factor for greater consumer spending.

"If you step back from the 90-day cycle, what I see is a lot of people moving into the middle class," Cook said on the call. He added that Apple has "a lot of happy customers" in China, pointing to the tech giant's recent store opening in Shanghai as indicative of consumer interest in its products.

"I feel good about China, I think more about long term than to the next week or so," Cook told CNBC in an interview before earnings.

Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider before publication.

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