What City Observatory did this week 1. Why diversification is a simplistic, often flawed economic strategy. When it comes to personal investment everyone understands (or certainly should understand) the concept of portfol... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. What super-commuters really mean.  Media coverage of super-commuters--people who travel more than 90 minutes each way to and from work--is invariably sympathetic, treating these fol... →

What City Observatory this week 1. 2019:  The Year Observed.  We take a look back at 2019 and review some of the most important City Observatory commentaries, interesting stories and valued research.  Our most read pos... →

What City Observatory did this week Remembering Dr. King. We were reminded of Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech about the pronounced tendency in public policy to prescribe socialism for the rich and rugged, free market ca... →

What City Observatory this week 1. The thickness of the blue line. Robert Putnam popularized the notion of social capital in his book "Bowling Alone," which he illustrated with a number of indicators of social interconnec... →

What City Observatory this week Exploding whales and cost overruns. For years, the Oregon Department of Transportation has been pushing a mile-and-a-half long freeway widening project at Portland's Rose Quarter, telling t... →

What City Observatory this week 1. Cheap gas means more pollution and more road deaths. Russia and Saudi Arabia have engineered a big decline in oil prices in the past few weeks, and as a result, US gas prices are now exp... →

What City Observatory this week 1. The Geography of Covid-19.  A week ago, we issued a call to get much more granular with our statistical analysis of the pandemic's spread.  In just the past few days, a number of new l... →

What City Observatory this week 1. The inequity built into Metro's proposed homeless strategy. Portland's Metro is rushing forward with a plan asking voters to approve $250 million per year in income taxes to fight homele... →

What City Observatory this week 1. Local flavor:  Which cities have the most independent restaurants.  Local eateries are one of the most visibly distinctive elements of any city. As Jane Jacobs said, the most important... →

What City Observatory this week 1. Talent drives economic development. We know the single most important factor determining metropolitan economic success:  It's determined by the education level of your population. The l... →

What City Observatory this week 1. A massive regional transportation spending plan that does nothing for climate change.  Portland's leaders are in the process of crafting a $3 billion plus regional transportation packag... →

What City Observatory this week 1. Oregon DOT repeats its idle lie about emissions. It's every highway builder's go-to response to climate change:  we could reduce greenhouse gas emissions if we could just keep cars from... →

What City Observatory this week 1. Portland's progress (or lack thereof) on climate. Portland likes to present itself as a climate leader, but the latest data on transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions shows that ... →

What City Observatory did the past couple of weeks 1. Using seismic scare stories to sell freeways. The Pacific Northwest is living on the edge; sometime (possibly tomorrow, possible several hundred years from now) we'll ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. No Deposit, No Return: Another lie to try and sell the $3 billion Columbia River Crossing. The state's of Oregon and Washington spent nearly $200 million planning the failed Columbia... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.  Copenhagen's cycling success hinges on tax policy and pricing, not just bike lanes.  The New York Times offers up yet another postcard view of cycling in Copenhagen, where riding ... →

What City Observatory did this week A two cent solution to climate change?  Around the world, plastic bags are an environmental scourge, both in the form a litter (a nuisance) and as a threat to wildlife. In response, ma... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Tim Bartik explains business incentives. States and cities spend about $50 billion a year on tax breaks and other incentives to try to influence business location decisions.  The na... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Our 5th Anniversary.  October 17 marked 5 years since we started publishing our research and commentary at City Observatory. We reflect back on five years of work, and thank all tho... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Transportation for America won't be fooled again..  After years of getting rolled by the freeway lobby, it appears that T4America has finally said "Enough."  Transit and active tra... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. We debunk the Wall Street Journal's claim of an exodus of young adults from cities.  Last week, the Wall Street Journal trumpeted an "exodus" of 25 to 39 year old adults from cities... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. 20 Reasons to ignore the Texas Transportation Institute's Urban Mobility Report. It's back. After a four-year hiatus Texas A&M University's transportation institute trotted out... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Beto O'Rourke brings a strong inclusive urbanist message to the Presidential contest.  While its been great to see housing affordability and climate change grow in prominence on the... →

A new report from the Urban Institute shows the stark costs of economic and racial segregation Long-form white paper policy research reports are our stock in trade at City Observatory. We see dozens of them every month,... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Carmaggedon stalks Atlanta. Following an arson-caused blaze, a key section on Interstate 85 in Atlanta collapsed, and is likely to be out of service for at least a couple of months. ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Too soon to write off city revival? The release of the Census county-level population estimates two weeks ago led to a series of quick-reaction analyses of what the data portend for ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. How we measure segregation depends on why we care. Daniel Hertz explores the various ways we measure the geographic separation of different racial and ethnic groups. There's a widely... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. How green was my city? The Trump administration's announcement that it would pull the US out of the Paris Climate Accords was greeted with dismay by many environmentalists, but gover... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Downzoning won't make housing cheaper. Chuck Marohn of StrongTowns notes that land that's zoned for apartments generally commands higher prices than nearby land zoned for single fami... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Urban Myth Busting: Idling in traffic and carbon pollution. There's a frequently repeated, just-so story about carbon emissions: if we didn't spend so much time stuck in stop-and-go ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. How luxury housing becomes affordable. It's always been the case that developers build new housing for those at the top end of the market. It's true today, and it was true 50 and 100... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Housing policy lessons from Vienna, Part II. In the second of his two guest commentaries, Mike Eliason takes a close look at land use laws and development processes in Vienna--a city... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The constancy of change in neighborhood populations. The canonical story of gentrification focuses on the fact that many of the people living in a neighborhood today are not the same... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The growing premium for urban living. Three years ago, City Observatory introduced the term "the Dow of cities." In essence, its the observation that the growth in city home prices r... →

What City Observatory did this week   1. Two thing's everyone's missed about Amazon's HQ2. The urbanist Internet has been all abuzz reading the tea leaves from Amazon's decision to winnow the list of contenders fo... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. City Limits: Some qualms about the new localism. The nation is deeply divided along political lines and it's depressingly unlikely that we'll generate national consensus on many issu... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Cappucino City.  Our friend and colleague Alex Baca offers the first of her three-part review of Derek Hyra's book "The Cappucino City." Baca, a former Washington DC journalist take... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The correlation between bad diets and vote for President. A new research paper has distilled mounds of data on consumer shopping behavior gleaned from supermarket scanners, and combi... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The Cappuccino Congestion Index. Media reports regularly regurgitate the largely phony claims about how traffic congestion costs travelers untold billions of dollars in wasted time. ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The Dow of Cities. The most predictable feature of any media business report is a recitation of the daily movements of major stock indices, like the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Housing reparations for Northeast Portland. The Oregon Department of Transportation is selling its plan to spend half a billion dollars widening a stretch of freeway in Portland by c... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Handicapping the city vs. suburb horse race. The latest round of Census population estimates for municipalities has led some observers to claim that city growth has faltered. We take... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Don't demonize cars, just stop subsidizing them. Is there anything in the urban space that is more inflamed than the passion and rhetoric around cars and driving? Advocates on both s... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Portland rents are going down. There are those who are skeptical that we can "build our way to affordability." But the economic evidence suggests that's exactly what's happening in P... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The limits of localism. A number of urban luminaries, including Bruce Katz and Richard Florida have been urging that we pin our hopes for social and policy change on local government... →

What City Observatory did this week This week, we published five posts taking a critical look at how a recent Urban Institute report, Measuring Inclusiveness, illustrates the problems and pitfalls of defining and measurin... →

What City Observatory did this week Peaks, Valleys and Donuts: Visualizing cities in cross-section. The University of Virginia's Demographics Research Group at the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service has produced a po... →

What City Observatory did for the past two weeks Alert followers will know the City Observatory has been preoccupied for the past two weeks; we're filling in with a "Two-Weeks Observed" edition this week, and will be back... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Highway to Hell. There's a new report out on the the future of the Interstate Highway System, and its a shocker. It's a shock because it shows that the National Academies of Engineer... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. You're going to need a bigger boat. We're excited that Minneapolis has pushed forward with the legalization of duplexes and triplexes in formerly single-family only zones, and that o... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Scooters are a success in Portland, but there's an insidious double standard. A new report from Portland's Bureau of Transportation details the success of the city's 120-day long exp... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Remembering Dr. King. We were reminded of Dr. Martin Luther King's speech about the pronounced tendency in public policy to prescribe socialism for the rich and rugged, free market c... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The limits of our current approaches to providing affordable housing. We present a summary of some remarks offered by Rob Stewart, a principal with JBG Smith Real Estate, reflecting ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.  Measuring Anti-Social Capital.  Thanks to the scholarship of Harvard's Robert Putnam, the idea of social capital has become firmly entrenched in the policy lexicon. Putnam and oth... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The idea of cities and the city of ideas. What cities do is bring people together, and the heightened interaction among people invariably generates friction, but also new ideas. City... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The economics of fruit, time, and place. Last week, Paul Krugman, fresh off his European vacation, waxed poetic about the fleeting joy of summer fruit, and true to form, may an econo... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Myth-busting:  Building new market rate housing doesn't drive up nearby rents. A favorite assertion of some housing supply-side skeptics is the theory that building new market rate ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. It's official: The Rose Quarter Freeway Widening is a Boondoggle. Frontier Group and USPIRG released the latest version of their annual Highway Boondoggle report, and the Oregon Depa... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Why is the US killing so many pedestrians? The grim data from 2018 are now available:  More than 6,200 US pedestrians were killed by automobiles last year, an increase of more than ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. What Oregon's "single family zoning ban" signals for housing policy. Just before adjourning, the 2019 Oregon Legislature adopted the nation's first statewide ban on exclusive, single... →

What City Observatory did this week About those swelling suburbs.  Much was made last week of a Wall Street Journal story noting that 14 of the 15 fastest growing cities with populations greater than 50,000 were suburbs.... →

What City Observatory did this week Homeownership is frequently a bad bet. Although homeownership gets treated as the best way to built wealth, it's actually a highly risky financial strategy for many households, especial... →

What City Observatory did this week Portland's food cart pods are dead; long live Portland's food cart pods. Portland is famous as a foodie town, and one of the city's claims to fame is having more than 500 food carts, mo... →

What City Observatory did this week   Must read 1. Why Detroit (and other cities) need more gentrification and congestion. Michigan Future's Lou Glazer has a provocative essay arguing that Detroit and other struggl... →

What City Observatory did this week Copenhagen's success:  More than just bike lanes.  Copenhagen is one of the world's great cycling cities, and its accomplishments are a a beacon to those looking to build more bike fr... →

What City Observatory did this week How helping families move to better neighborhoods reduces segregation and promotes opportunity. The work of the Opportunity Insights project, led by Harvard's Raj Chetty, has shown co... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. CityLab: Everything you think you know about gentrification is wrong. We take a look at a recent CityLab article reporting (faithfully) the findings of some recent research on gent... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Why gentrification is good for long time residents of low income neighborhoods. We take a close look at a new study from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank that challenges much of... →

What City Observatory did this week Exit, hope and loyalty:  What's behind neighborhood change? America's neighborhoods are always changing, and it's often a question of whether change is driven more by hope or despair. ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Who bikes? Discussions of investing in bike infrastructure are often fraught with arguments about who benefits, with oft-expressed fears that bike lanes chiefly benefit a spandex-wea... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Will upzoning help housing affordability?  Housing supply denialism--claims that the laws of supply and demand don't apply to housing markets--have a ready audience in the NIMBY com... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The limits of design thinking. Really good design can frequently improve the utility and performance of everyday objects, and there's little question that the attentiveness to softwa... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The high cost of low house prices. We generally take low house prices as a sign that housing is affordable, but the reality isn't that simple. In the case of cities and urban neighbo... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Kevin Bacon and Musical Chairs teach us housing economics. It's an article of faith among economists that more housing, even higher end housing, will help ease rising rents. But to l... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. More Orwell from the Oregon Department of Transportation. When it comes to any public policy decision, but especially one that involves spending $500 million (and likely a good deal ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The annual Ben and Jerry's advanced seminar in transportation economics. If you love ice cream--who doesn't?--Tuesday was your chance to get a free cone at Ben and Jerry's and while ... →

What City Observatory did this week Widening freeways doesn't reduce crashes or crash related delay.  The Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to spend half a billion dollars to widen a mile-long stretch of I... →

What City Observatory did this week A note to City Observatory readers:  Bear with us, folks:  We're in the last week of our month-long deep dive into  Portland's debate about whether to spend a half billion dollars to... →

What City Observatory did this week A note to City Observatory readers:  We're deep in the thick of Portland's debate about whether to spend a half billion dollars to widen a mile-long stretch of freeway near the city's ... →

What City Observatory did this week A note to City Observatory readers:  We're deep in the thick of Portland's debate about whether to spend a half billion dollars to widen a mile-long stretch of freeway near the city's ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The high price of cheap gas. The most fundamental point in economics is that people respond to incentives. Make something cheaper to buy, and people will buy more of it. Make someth... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Widening freeways increases car travel and carbon emissions. Induced demand from additional freeway capacity is now so well proven that it's referred to "The Fundamental Law of Road ... →

What City Observatory did this week It's time to get serious about climate change.  We published a guest commentary from City Observatory friend Ethan Seltzer, who takes a critical look at the largely rhetorical approach... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities, Ideas and Us:  Paul Romer's Nobel Address.  Romer, who won this year's Nobel Prize in the Economic Sciences had some interesting things to say about cities in his address t... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The limits of Nieman Marcus environmentalism. It's fashionable to demonstrate one's green credibility by conspicuous acts of non-consumption, but framing our environmental problems a... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Displacement by decline.  Akron Planning Director Jason Segedy offers a guest post on our misplaced obsession with gentrification. He argues that pundits and urban policy people are... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. If your corporate campus has 10,000 parking spaces, it isn't really "walkable." With great fanfare, American Airlines has announced its building a new corporate campus in Fort Worth.... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The neighborhood you grow up shapes your life chances, especially for black kids. New research from the Equality of Opportunity Project shows the profound effect that neighborhoods h... →

Editors Note: We're offering an abbreviated Thanksgiving Week version of the Week Observed. Our regular features--must read, new knowledge, and in the news--will return next Friday. What City Observatory did this week 1.... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. There will be two HQ2, just as we predicted. Back in January, we took a close look at the Amazon HQ2 location contest. We said that the decision to build a second headquarters wasn't... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Carol Coletta on why cities need to embrace change. We publish Carol Coletta's remarks to the Congress for the New Urbanism, outlining the case for thinking about cities in a more dy... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.  Now we are four. October 17 marked City Observatory's fourth birthday. We celebrated with a shout-out to our founders, funders and partners, and reflected on what we think the most... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities talent and prosperity. The latest report from the Economic Innovation Group has some interesting zip code data on the relative economic performance of the nation's neighborhoo... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. An affogato theory of transportation. The combination of gelato and espresso is a special treat, and it also neatly captures two of our favorite parables about how transportation rea... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. If you want less displacement, build more housing. A common refrain at planning commission meetings around the country is that cities ought to block new housing as a way of insulatin... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Philadelphia's urban policy harmonic convergence. The proposal to build a multi-billion dollar expansion of University City adjacent to Drexel University and Philadelphia's Center Ci... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. We disagree with the Washington Post on housing economics. Two weeks ago, the Washington Post published an article claiming that rents were going down for higher income renters but i... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Jason Segedy on gentrification. This week we feature a guest column from Akron planning director Jason Segedy. You can't build new housing in any existing neighborhood, it seems, wit... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.  Nattering nabobs of NIMBYism at the New York Times. Columnist Tim Egan called plans for a limited upzoning to enable more people to live in Seattle an unholy conspiracy of develope... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.  Your summertime must read: Alan Mallach's Divided City. We have a review of this newly released book, which we think every urbanist ought to read. Although written primarily from t... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Closing the Kumbaya Gap. As we documented in our recent report, America's Most Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods, a growing number of cities boast neighborhoods with relatively hig... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Envisioning how we want to live in cities. Much of the discussion of the future of cities seems to revolve around what kind of new technologies we might apply in urban settings. But ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. City Report: America's Most Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods.  Our new City Report digs deep into the patterns of racial/ethnic and income segregation in US metro areas. We've us... →

What City Observatory did this week Caveat Rentor: the problem with flawed rental inflation statistics. We highlight the continuing problem of erratic and unreliable rental price indices. A recent column by a financial jo... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Growth in the center. A new report from New York City's Office of Planning graphically demonstrates the growing centralization of people and economic activity in the nation's largest... →

What City Observatory did this week California's next step in fighting global warming is building more apartments near transit. California has been a leader in climate change policy, being one of the first states to execu... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities as selection environments. It's an article of faith in the economic development business that cheaper is better, or at least more competitive. The claim is that businesses wil... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Why don't we have a powerful federal agency who can pre-empt local laws that drive up housing costs? Last week, the Federal Communications Commission took action that invalidated a ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Gerontopoly:  Is homeownership a sure route to building wealth? It has been in the US, but increasingly, its only working for older generations. Homeowners 55 and older now hold mos... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Gentrification and integration in DC schools and neighborhoods. A recent study looks at changes in school enrollment in the most gentrified neighborhoods in Washington DC over the pa... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Portland doesn't really want to make housing affordable. Portland's City Council has officially declared a housing crisis, and has passed strong renter protection measured and an ill... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Portland's teachable moment: time for a little housing economics 101. There's a big debate going on in Portland right now about whether using discretionary land use approvals to bloc... →

What City Observatory did this week Drinking, Parking, Flying, Peaking, Pricing:  The five drivers of ride-hailing demand. The Transportation Research Board has published a dense, 100 page study of ride-hailing demand, d... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. We're losing the battle for Vision Zero. One of the compelling aspects of the Vision Zero road safety campaign is its bold, measurable objective: we want to completely eliminate traf... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Is inequality over? There was some good news from the labor market this month. According to an analysis by Jed Kolko, low wage workers saw their earnings increase slightly faster tha... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Should cities be worried about "Peak Millennial?"  Time magazine highlighted data from three cities where the count of millennials has declined in the past year, according to the Am... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.  How great cities enable you to live longer. We take a close look at some findings from the Equality of Opportunity Project on the connections between community characteristics and ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities continue to attract the young and restless. We've seen some push-back in the last few months, arguing that city population growth is no longer outpacing suburbs, and that the ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The death of Flint Street. In Portland, a $450 million dollar freeway widening project is being sold as a way to "re-connect" a community that was divided by freeway construction hal... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Uber and Lyft: A dynamic duo(poly)? The continued growth of the ride-hailing industry has been something we've followed closely. New data show that in most major markets across the c... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Rent control's impact on the San Francisco housing market.   A new study from three Stanford economists dissects the impacts of rent control in San Francisco. Using a late-in-the-g... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Renter's credit scores are rising. What does that mean? New data from RentCafe shows a noticeable increase in the average credit scores of successful applicants for rental housing. I... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Signs of the times. For most of the past few years, Portland--like other flourishing metro economies--has seen significant increases in apartment rents, as demand for urban living ha... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Subarus and Suburbans: Flat fee unfairness. Proposals to implement some form of road pricing, which would charge cars based on which roads they use, when, and how far they drive, hav... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Now we are 3.  This week marks City Observatory's third birthday. It's been an exciting time to be engaged with cities. We take a few minutes to review what we've done over the past... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. What price autonomous vehicles?  It's easy to obsess about the cool technological details of autonomous vehicles: their sophisticated computers, LIDAR systems, and vehicle-to-vehicl... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.Interim report card on Portland's Inclusionary Zoning Ordinance: An Incomplete. Portland's inclusionary zoning requirements have been in effect for six months. While the ordinance pro... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Cash prizes for bad corporate citizenship.  The urban world is all abuzz, handicapping the city vs. city vs. city race to land Amazon's HQ2, a rich prize of investment and jobs.  A... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Inequality in three charts. New data produced by Thomas Piketty and his colleagues provides a rich, high-definition look at the growth of income inequality in the US. But while the q... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Is the urban revival over? A provocative (but highly misleading) headline in last week's New York Times sits atop Richard Florida's op-ed about the future of cities. Although Florida... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Such a deal.  Suppose someone offered you this investment deal: You can get $200,000 in preferred stock, that pays a 5% annual dividend tax free, and when it comes time to sell this... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. How green is my free parking structure?  Not very.  The National Renewable Energy Lab does cutting edge research on wind, solar and renewable energy. One area where their thinking ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Climate change: the two-cent solution. The City of Chicago charges its residents a fee of 7 cents for each disposable grocery bag. The fee provides revenue and more importantly, crea... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Why median rents are an incomplete and often misleading indicator of housing affordability. Our colleague Daniel Hertz shows how the median rent statistics that are often cited to de... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Hundred dollar bills on the municipal sidewalk? There's a lot of interest in tapping the hidden value of municipal assets to address city financial problems. The typical city owns bi... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities and the returns to education. We know that the nation's best educated people are increasingly concentrated in urban areas. Data compiled by the US Department of Agriculture's ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Cultural appropriation: Theft or smorgasbord? A recent Internet furor erupted over a Portland burrito stand that copied its recipe from that of street vendors in Mexico. An essential... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Dirt Cheap. A number of tech startups are exploring techniques for high density urban farming. In theory, new methods, like vertical farming in plastic tubes, can greatly reduce the ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Mystery in the Bookstore. In cities around the country, there's been a noticeable rebound in the local bookstore business. After decades of steady decline, this is a pleasant surpris... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. 13 propositions about autonomous vehicles. Despite occasional setbacks–like last week's crash of an Uber self-driving car in Phoenix–it looks increasingly likely that autonomous ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Are restaurants dying and taking city economies with them? In a column at Governing, Alan Ehrenhalt raises the alarm that a city economic revival predicated on what he calls "cafe ur... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The US retail industry is getting marked down in a big way, with hundreds of stores operated by well-established chains including Macy's, J. C. Penney, and the Gap, as well as others... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. More flawed congestion rankings. Traffic analysis firm Inrix released yet another report purporting to estimate the dollar cost of congestion and ranking the world's cities from mos... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Shrinking offices: What it means for cities. Its not just you're imagination: offices are becoming less common and smaller, and a variety of space-sharing and space-saving practices ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Anti-social capital. You're probably familiar with the term "social capital" which Robert Putnam popularized with his book Bowling Alone. In it Putnam devised a series of indicators ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The persistence of talent. City Observatory regularly stresses the strong connection between educational attainment and economic success at the metro level. We step back and look at ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.What HOT Lanes tell us about the value of travel time. The economic underpinning of claims that traffic congestion costs Americans billions and billions of dollars each year is the as... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.Busting the urban myth about high income housing and affordability. One of the most widespread beliefs about housing is that the construction of new high income housing somehow makes ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Volunteering as a measure of social capital. Thanks to the work of Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone and more recently, Our Kids, there's a growing understanding of the importan... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The long journey toward greater equity in transportation. The observance of Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday got us thinking about how far we've come–and how far we have yet to g... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.How urban geometry creates neighborhood identity. Our colleague Daniel Hertz is back this week with an examination of the way we look at and think about neighborhood identities. He po... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. A Toast to 2017:  Beer and Cities. Its traditional to begin the New Year with a delicious beverage, and more and more Americans are choosing to celebrate with a locally brewed ale. ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. How diverse are the neighborhoods white people live in? Data from the newly released 5-year American Community Survey tabulations give us an updated picture of the demographics of ur... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. A rebound in millennial car-buying?. Stories purporting to debunk the tendency of younger adults to move to cities, buy fewer houses and drive less seem to have great appeal to edito... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The illegal city of Somerville. Just outside of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Somerville is one of the most sought after suburbs in the Boston area. It has a combination of attractive ne... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Urban transportation's camel problem.   Naive optimism is the order of the day in speculating about the future of urban transportation.  In theory, some combination of autonomous ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Pollution and poor neighborhoods. Environmental justice advocates point out--quite correctly--that poor neighborhoods tend to suffer much higher levels of pollution than the typical... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.  The rise of global neighborhoods.  A new paper published in Demography by Wenquan Zhang and John Logan traces out the changes in the racial and ethnic composition of US neighborho... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.  Daytime and nighttime segregation. Economic, racial and ethnic segregation are persistent features of the American metropolis. Most studies measure segregation using Census data on... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.  A tax credit for renters.  The Terman Center for Housing Innovation at the UC Berkeley has come up with three fleshed-out and cost-estimated models for providing tax credits for l... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.  The myth of a revealed preference for suburban living. It's often argued that most Americans must prefer to live in suburbs because so many persons do so. We take a close look at t... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.Measuring Walkability:  Non-car modes of transportation have always been at a disadvantage in policy discussions because of a profound lack of widely available quantitative measures ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.  More evidence job growth is shifting to city centers.  A recent paper by Nathaniel Baum-Snow and Daniel Hartley has some interesting data on the pattern of job growth in the natio... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.  Cities for Everyone:  Our Birthday Wish.  October 15 marked City Observatory’s second birthday. We reviewed some of the highlights of the past year, focusing on the growing evi... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.  Bubble Logic.  A major and persistent change in the housing market from a decade ago has been the decline in the number of “trade-up” home-buyers. While some fret that recent ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Where are African-American entrepreneurs?  A new Census Bureau survey, undertaken in cooperation with the Kauffman Foundation provides a detailed demographic profile of the owners o... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. America's most creative metros, ranked by Kickstarter campaigns. One of the most popular ways to raise funds for a new creative project--music, a video, an artistic endeavor, or even... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities are powering the rebound in national income growth. There was great news in this week's Census report: After years of stagnation, average household income saw its largest one... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Counting Women Entrepreneurs.  The Census Bureau has just released the results of its new survey of entrepreneurs, and we report its key findings on the extent and geography of wo... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Which cities and metros shop most at small retail firms? A new "big data" set from the JPMorganChase Institute offers some answers. It uses 16 billion transactions from the bank's c... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. How economically integrated is your city? It keeps getting clearer: Mixed-income neighborhoods are an important force in helping more kids escape poverty. So has economic integratio... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The high price of cheap gas. We've hit the peak of summer driving season, and also the 103rd consecutive week of falling year-on-year gas prices. Though the 39 percent drop in gas p... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The national party platforms on transit. In November, most Americans will be choosing between a party whose platform offers the barest details and seemingly little understanding of ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The case for more Ubers. From mobile phones to microchips, it's clear that even mega-companies must act in consumer interest when competition forces them to. When Uber and Lyft can p... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Economist Paul Romer Joins the World Bank.  Paul Romer, a leading exponent of the New Growth Theory has been hired as chief economist for the World Bank. We explore how his thinking... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Homeownership:  A failed wealth creation strategy.  Its an article of faith that owning a home is the most reliable route to wealth building in the US.  But this hasn't been true ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. How safe will the autonomous cars of the future be? The first-ever fatal collision involving a Tesla running on autopilot mode has prompted a debate on that subject. On the one hand,... →

The Week Observed recently celebrated its first birthday! At the end of June 2015, we sent our first roundup of the most important urbanist news to about 700 people; since then, we've faithfully published a new issue every... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Last week's big news was Brexit: the vote by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. What does that have to do with urban policy on our side of the Atlantic? Well, it turns o... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Urban housing is a massive asset. How massive? Well, a comparison to the valuation of our nation's biggest corporations shows it's no comparison at all—housing in major cities has ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Does Rent Control Work: Evidence from Berlin.  Economists are nearly unanimous about rent control:  they think it doesn't work. Berlin's recent adoption of a new rent control sche... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. In previous installments of our "Sprawl Tax" series, we've calculated the billions of dollars that longer distances between homes and workplaces cost American commuters, and shown th... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Last week, we introduced the "Sprawl Tax": the time and money American commuters spend just because their cities are more spread out than they might be. This week, we compare America... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. In real life, somehow, Google patented sticky cars so that when their autonomous vehicles hit pedestrians, they won't get thrown into the air, but will rather be pinned to the vehicl... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Last month, we released the Storefront Index, a report that catalogued the nation's retail clusters and provided a window into the spatial organization of an important part of Jane J... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. What's the relationship between urban sprawl, income segregation, and economic opportunity? A recent study by Reid Ewing and colleagues at the University of Utah used an innovative n... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. A new study from Stanford Business School claims that society reaps the greatest benefits from low-income housing when that housing is built in the lowest-income neighborhoods—as o... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. At City Observatory, we're interested in hard numbers—but we're also interested in the human community and public spaces that cities can create. As we did in April with "Lost in Pl... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. This week, we were proud to release City Observatory's latest report: The Storefront Index. The Storefront Index maps and tallies every "storefront" business in the 51 largest US met... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. When we measure segregation, we almost always use Census numbers that reflect where people live—ie, where their homes are. But people don't spend all day in their homes, so a team ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. More than half of commuters to jobs in classically suburban DuPage County, outside Chicago, say they'd like to walk, bike, or take transit—but nearly 90 percent of them drive anywa... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Even in a relatively dense city like Chicago, large amounts of off-street parking goes unused daily. A new report from the Center for Neighborhood Technology documents the over-suppl... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Have we reached "peak Millennial"? One researchers argues that because new births peaked in 1990, today's 26-year-olds represent the high water mark of a youth-led urban renaissance.... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. When supply catches up to demand, rents go down. While stories about crazy housing markets tend to focus on big, coastal metropolitan areas, it turns out there's a lot to learn from ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Finding nuance in the housing supply arguments. A new article from Rick Jacobus at Shelterforce helps resolve some of the tensions in the growing debate about whether and how housing... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Muddling income inequality and economic segregation. What does it mean to be a prosperous city? What does it mean to be a city with high economic inequality? These questions can be d... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities can't solve all our problems. Like other people who think and work about cities and urban issues, we're often focused on how ground-level changes can make cities better—thin... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Another round on the Washington Post's housing roundtable. On Friday, we took part in a roundtable at the Washington Post's Wonkblog on what it would take to solve the housing afford... →

Next week, we'll be releasing our latest City Report, which maps the location of consumer-facing businesses around the nation to provide a new, quantitative measure of a city's street-level vitality—one facet of Jane Jac... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. More evidence on the "Dow of cities." We've argued before that evidence of shifting demand for urban real estate can be read as a sort of "stock" in cities—and that cities' stock ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Don't demonize driving—just stop subsidizing it. City Observatory likes to make data-driven arguments—but the rhetorical frameworks we use to explain the data matter, too. Here, ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The market cap of cities. What's the value of a city? We've taken a stab at answering that question—at least, the value of a city's housing. Using a measure called market capitaliz... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Which federal agency has a big role to play in housing affordability? The answer might surprise you. The Federal Reserve has announced a plan to increase the interest rates it charge... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Bending the carbon curve in the wrong direction. After years in which Americans were driving less, cheap gas is helping to push those numbers back up—erasing a full sixth of the pr... →

This week, Planetizen named City Observatory one of its 10 best urban websites of 2015, adding that "every single post is essential reading." We're extremely grateful for the recognition, and are excited about continuing o... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The Katy isn't ready for its closeup. When the Texas Department of Transportation tried to sell the public on its Katy Freeway expansion project, part of the story was that it would ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Don't bank on it. Hillary Clinton, as part of her campaign for President, has proposed a National Infrastructure Bank to help local governments pay for crucial infrastructure mainten... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. A $1.6 billion proposal. A film school teacher in San Francisco had some people talking about "ethical landlording" as a solution to the problem of too-high real estate prices. But s... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Engaged communities, civic participation, and democracy. A guest post from the Knight Foundation's Carol Coletta begins by noting some dismal numbers on voting in American cities—e... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Ways forward to more equitable land use law. Following up on last week's posts about William Fischel's new book, Zoning Rules!, and its arguments about how America got into its curre... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The high price of cheap gas. While many economists emphasize the positive effects of low gas prices—more disposable income in consumers' pockets, which can act as a stimulus—it's... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. What filtering can and can't do. In most cities, the majority of homes that are affordable to people of modest or low incomes don't receive special affordability subsidies—they're ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. More doubt cast on food deserts. The concept of a "food desert"—typically low-income urban neighborhoods where a lack of nearby grocery stores leads to poor nutrition—is widely a... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Introducing City Observatory policy memos. At City Observatory, one of our goals is to translate the best and latest urban policy research for advocates, organizers, and practitioner... →

Our partners and supporters at the Knight Foundation have announced a new round of the Knight Cities Challenge, which gives grants to people and organizations around the country for projects that make their cities more li... →

A year ago today, October 15th, 2014, we launched City Observatory, a data-driven voice on what makes for successful cities. [caption id="attachment_1725" align="alignnone" width="800"] The Plaza in Kansas City. Credit... →

Our partners and supporters at the Knight Foundation have announced a new round of the Knight Cities Challenge, which gives grants to people and organizations around the country for projects that make their cities more li... →

Last week, our partners and supporters at the Knight Foundation announced a new round of the Knight Cities Challenge, which gives grants to people and organizations around the country for projects that make their cities mo... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities' role in growing our nation's economy. New data from the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis builds on our "Dow of Cities" post and Surging City Center Job Growth report to sh... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Zoning in everything—even the education gap. By now, thanks to renewed attention in major media outlets from writers like the New York Times' Nikole Hannah-Jones, many observers of... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The latest from the Louisville travel behavior experiment. Just before the New Year, Louisville started charging tolls to cross its newly-widened I-65 bridge. When it did, traffic ac... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Great neighborhoods don't have to be illegal—they're not elsewhere. Daniel Kay Hertz follows up on our earlier piece about illegal neighborhoodsto point out that most other wealthy... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. My illegal neighborhood. Guest Commentary writer Robert Liberty describes all the things he loves about his neighborhood in Northwest Portland—and then explains why all of them wou... →

In last Friday’s The Week Observed, we flagged an exhaustive literature review from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, summarizing what we know about gentrification and neighborhood change over about 40 pages. We... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Looking at housing injustice requires a broad lens. A new research project on Bay Area neighborhood change defines "displacement" as any reduction in the number of low-income people ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Another tall tale from the Texas Transportation Institute. This week, TTI released another episode of its "Urban Mobility Report," claiming to measure the cost of congestion and trac... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.  The suburbs: where the rich ride transit.  In many cities, transit ridership is dominated by a transit dependent population:  people who can afford to own private cars don't use ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. City home prices outpacing suburbs by 50 percent.  Joe Cortright examines a new study prepared by investment firm Fitch looking at the growing value premium in central cities.  Sin... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Let's talk about neighborhood stigma. Daniel Kay Hertz reviews some of the literature on the interplay between a neighborhood's reputation and its disadvantage—and finds a surprisi... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Our old planning rules of thumb are "all thumbs." Joe Cortright argues that many of the heuristics that have guided urban planning for decades, such as "wider streets are safer stre... →

What City Observatory did this week This week, we ran a three-part series on what we mean by "housing affordability." 1. In The way we measure housing affordability is broken, Daniel Kay Hertz writes about the problems... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Why aren't we talking about Marietta, Georgia? Joe Cortright covers a Robert Moses-style case of "slum clearance" in suburban Atlanta. The city of Marietta is demolishing a complex ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. In More evidence on the changing demographics of American downtowns, Daniel Kay Hertz looks at a recent study from the Cleveland Fed on growing high-income neighborhoods in city core... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Three more takeaways from Harvard's "The State of the Nation's Housing" report. Daniel Kay Hertz picks out three important but overlooked findings from the massive study released las... →

Below is the inaugural issue of The Week Observed, City Observatory’s weekly newsletter. Every Friday, we’ll give you a quick review of the most important articles, blog posts, and scholarly research on American citie... →