The Week Observed, September 27, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 27.9.2019
The Week Observed, September 20, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 20.9.2019
The Week Observed, January 10, 2020 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... → By Joe Cortright 10.1.2020
The Week Observed, January 24, 2020 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... → By Joe Cortright 24.1.2020
The Week Observed, January 12, 2024 What City Observatory did this week The pernicious myth of "Naturally Occurring" Affordable Housing. One of the most dangerous and misleading concepts in housing reared its ugly head in the form a a new publication from... → By Joe Cortright 12.1.2024
The Week Observed, January 26, 2024 What City Observatory this week Robert Moses strikes again: One of the most infamous decisions of "The Power Broker" was to build the overpasses on the Long Island Expressway too low to allow city buses to use the roadw... → By Joe Cortright 26.1.2024
The Week Observed, January 19, 2024 What City Observatory this week Why does it take four years and $200 million for consultants to serve up a warmed-over version of the Columbia River Crossing? The Interstate Bridge Replacement Project’s director admit... → By Joe Cortright 19.1.2024
The Week Observed, January 15, 2024 What City Observatory this week 1. The Urban Institute gets inclusion backwards. The Urban Institute has released an updated set of estimates that purport to measure which US cities are the most inclusive. The report i... → By Joe Cortright 15.1.2021
The Week Observed, January 22, 2021 What City Observatory this week Institutionalized housing discrimination. A recent study of housing discrimination in Detroit came to a seemingly surprising conclusion: Fair housing complaints were less likely to be fil... → By Joe Cortright 22.1.2021
The Week Observed, January 29, 2021 What City Observatory this week 1. Why Portland's Rose Quarter Freeway widening will increase greenhouse gas emissions. The Oregon Department of Transportation hashas falsely claimed its $800 million freeway widening pr... → By Joe Cortright 29.1.2021
The Week Observed, February 5, 2021 What City Observatory this week 1. Calculating induced travel. Widening freeways to reduce traffic congestion in dense urban areas inevitably fails because of the scientifically demonstrated problem of induced demand; som... → By Joe Cortright 5.2.2021
The Week Observed, February 12, 2021 What City Observatory this week 1. How housing segregation reduces Black wealth. Black-owned homes are valued at a discount to all housing, but the disparity is worst in highly segregated metro areas. There's a st... → By Joe Cortright 12.2.2021
The Week Observed, February 19, 2021 What City Observatory this week 1. Covid migration: Disproportionately young, economically stressed and people of color. Data shows the moves prompted by Covid-19 are more reflective of economic distress for the vulne... → By Joe Cortright 19.2.2021
The Week Observed, February 26, 2021 What City Observatory this week 1. Revealed: Oregon Department of Transportation's secret plans for a ten-lane I-5 freeway at the Rose Quarter. For years, ODOT has been claiming that its $800 million freeway widening pr... → By Joe Cortright 26.2.2021
The Week Observed, April 2, 2021 What City Observatory this week 1. How the Oregon Department of Transportation destroyed a Portland neighborhood, Part 2: The Moses Meat Axe. We continue our historical look at the role that freeway construction (and ... → By Joe Cortright 2.4.2021
The Week Observed, April 9, 2021 What City Observatory this week 1. How ODOT destroyed Albina: Part 3 the Phantom Freeway. Even a freeway that never got built played a key role in demolishing part of Portland's Albina neighborhood. In parts 1 and 2... → By Joe Cortright 7.3.2021
The Week Observed, April 16, 2021 What City Observatory this week 1. Taking Tubman: The Oregon Department of Transportation is planning to widen the Interstate 5 freeway in Portland into the backyard of Harriet Tubman Middle School. The $800 million w... → By Joe Cortright 16.4.2021
The Week Observed, April 30, 2021 What City Observatory this week 1. Restorative justice without funding is a sham. Portland's Albina neighborhood was decimated by the construction of three Oregon Department of Transportation highway projects in the 195... → By Joe Cortright 30.4.2021
The Week Observed, April 23, 2021 What City Observatory this week 1. Fighting climate change is inherently equitable. While there's a growing recognition of the existential threat posed by climate change, it's becoming increasingly frequent to pit equity ... → By Joe Cortright 23.4.2021
The Week Observed, May 7, 2021 What City Observatory this week 1. It's not a bridge replacement, it's a 5 mile long, 12 lane wide freeway that just happens to cross a river. The Oregon and Washington highway departments are trying to revive the faile... → By Joe Cortright 7.5.2021
The Week Observed, May 14, 2021 What City Observatory this week Don't be fooled again. The Oregon and Washington state highway departments are up to their old tricks in trying to push a multi-billion dollar highway building boondoggle in the POrtland ... → By Joe Cortright 14.5.2021
The Week Observed, May 21, 2021 What City Observatory this week 1. Needed: A bolder, better building back. In response to an invitation from its authors, we take a look at a "grand bargain" proposed by Patrick Doherty and Chris Leinberger for breaki... → By Joe Cortright 21.5.2021
The Week Observed, July 16, 2021 What City Observatory did this week An open letter to Secretary Pete Buttigieg on his visit to Oregon. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg came to Oregon this week to look at some local transportation innovations. ... → By Joe Cortright 16.7.2021
The Week Observed, July 30, 2021 What City Observatory did this week Oregon Department of Transportation's Climate Fig-Leaf. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in Oregon, and the state's Department of Transportation is—yet again... → By Joe Cortright 30.7.2021
The Week Observed, September 17, 2021 What City Observatory did this week The cost of Oregon DOT's Rose Quarter project has nearly tripled to $1.25 billion. Just four years ago, the Oregon Department of transportation sold its mile-and-a-half long I-5 freew... → By Eli Molloy 17.9.2021
The Week Observed, September 10, 2021 What City Observatory did this week Talkin' 'bout my gentrification. Jerusalem Demsas of Vox has a thoughtful synthesis of what we know about gentrification. If we're concerned about poverty and inequality, gentrifi... → By Joe Cortright 10.9.2021
The Week Observed, April 1, 2022 What City Observatory did this week 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. ... → By Joe Cortright 1.4.2022
The Week Observed, April 15, 2022 What City Observatory did this week A universal basic income . . . for cars. One of the most widely discussed alternatives for tackling poverty and inequality head on is the idea of a "Universal Basic Income"--a payment... → By Joe Cortright 15.4.2022
The Week Observed, April 22, 2022 What City Observatory did this week How sprawl and tax evasion are driving demands for wider freeways. The Oregon and Washington Departments of Transportation are proposing to spend roughly $5 billion to widen a 5 mile ... → By Joe Cortright 22.4.2022
The Week Observed, April 29, 2022 What City Observatory did this week The folly of the frog ferry. One bane of transportation policy discussions is the tendency to believe that miracle technical fixes—self-driving cars, personal aircraft, the Segway, ... → By Joe Cortright 2.5.2022
The Week Observed, May 6, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Ten questions that deserve answers before making a multi-billion dollar decision. The Portland metro area is being asked by the Oregon and Washington Departments of Transportation to gi... → By Joe Cortright 6.5.2022
The Week Observed, May 13, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Just Say "No" to freeway widening zealots. George Santayana meet David Bragdon: Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat the failures of the past. A year ago, we pu... → By Joe Cortright 13.5.2022
The Week Observed, May 20, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Another exploding whale: The cost of the I-205 bridge project doubles in four years. Famously in the 1960s, the Oregon State Highway Department tried to dispose of the carcass of a wh... → By Joe Cortright 20.5.2022
The Week Observed, June 10, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Oregon DOT's "reign of error"—chronic cost overruns on highway projects. The Oregon Department of Transportation is moving forward with a multi-billion dollar freeway expansion plan... → By Joe Cortright 10.6.2022
The Week Observed, June 17, 2022 What City Observatory did this week There's nothing green about free parking, no matter how many solar panels you put on the garage. The US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory brags about its sus... → By Joe Cortright 28.5.2022
The Week Observed, June 24, 2022 What City Observatory did this week The economics of fruit, time, and place. It's berry time in Portland, and that got us thinking about how special local products are in defining quality of life. Recently, Paul Krugm... → By Joe Cortright 24.6.2022
The Week Observed, July 1, 2022 Must read The most gas guzzling states. The sting of higher gas prices depends on where you live, not so much because of the variation in prices, but because in some states, you just have drive a lot more. The website Q... → By Joe Cortright 28.5.2022
The Week Observed, July 15, 2022 What City Observatory did this week A Bridge too low. The Oregon DOT is fundamentally misrepresenting the process and legal standards for setting the height of a proposed new multi-billion dollar I-5 bridge across the C... → By Joe Cortright 28.5.2022
The Week Observed, July 22, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Failing to learn from the failure of the Columbia River Crossing. Last week, Portland's Metro Council voted 6-1 to wave on the Oregon Department of Transportation's plan for a multi-b... → By Joe Cortright 28.5.2022
The Week Observed, July 29, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Fix it Last. The Oregon Department of Transportation claims that it has a "Fix-it" first policy--prioritizing spending funds to preserve existing roads and bridges. But their actual... → By Joe Cortright 29.7.2022
The Week Observed, November 18, 2022 What City Observatory did this week The Rose Quarter’s Big U-Turn: Deadman’s Curve? The redesign of the I-5 Rose Quarter project creates a hazardous new hairpin off-ramp from Interstate 5. This supposed ... → By Joe Cortright 21.11.2022
The Week Observed, November 11, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Risky bridges. The Oregon and Washington highway departments are blundering ahead with a $5 billion plan to widen I-5 between Portland and Vancouver, and are making many of the same m... → By Joe Cortright 11.11.2022
The Week Observed, February 3, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Groundhog's Day for Climate. So you think you're not Bill Murray in the classic "Groundhog's Day?" Oregonians, ask yourself: are we anywhere closer to seriously addressi... → By Joe Cortright 3.2.2023
The Week Observed, January 27, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Driving stakes, selling bonds, overdosing on debt. The Oregon Department of Transportation is following a well trodden path to push the state toward a massive highway expans... → By Joe Cortright 27.1.2023
The Week Observed, March 10, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Why does a $500 million bridge replacement cost $7.5 billion? For the past several years, the Oregon and Washington highway departments have been pushing for construction of somet... → By Joe Cortright 10.3.2023
The Week Observed, March 17, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Why does a $500 million bridge cost $7.5 billion? For almost two decades the Oregon and Washington highway departments have been saying they want to replace the I-5 bridges over t... → By Joe Cortright 17.3.2023
The Week Observed, March 23, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Oregon's transportation finance in crisis: Testimony to the Joint Ways and Means Committee. On March 16, City Observatory's Joe Cortright testified to the Oregon Legislature's b... → By Joe Cortright 24.3.2023
The Week Observed, March 31, 2023 What City Observatory did this week What are they hiding? Oregon and Washington are being asked to spend $7.5 billion on a giant bridge: Why won’t anyone show pictures of what it would look like? The Oregon ... → By Joe Cortright 31.3.2023
The Week Observed, April 7, 2023 What City Observatory did this week IBR's plan to sabotage the "moveable span" alternative. The proposed $7.5 billion Portland area freeway widening project is supposedly looking at a moveable span option to avoid i... → By Joe Cortright 7.4.2023
The Week Observed, April 14, 2023 What City Observatory did this week The case against the Interstate Bridge Project. We offer 16 reasons why Oregon and Washington lawmakers should question the current plans for the proposed $7.5 billion I-5 freeway... → By Joe Cortright 14.4.2023
The Week Observed, June 30, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Scratch one flat top! That was the famous cry of US Naval aviators, when, early in World War II they chalked up their first victory, sinking the Japanese aircraft carrier Shoho. Por... → By Joe Cortright 30.6.2023
The Week Observed, September 15, 2023 What City Observatory did this week This is what victory looks like. Freeway fighting is hard, drawn-out work. StateDOTs and their allies have vast funding for public relations campaigns to sell giant projects; citize... → By Joe Cortright 15.9.2023
The Week Observed, October 6, 2023 What City Observatory did this week What if we regulated new car ownership the same way we do new housing? Getting a building permit for a new house is difficult, expensive, and in some places, simply impossible. In c... → By Joe Cortright 8.9.2023
The Week Observed, October 20, 2023 Must Read Portland: Four Floors and Corner Stores--Upzoning for urban development and housing affordability. A coalition of community, enviornmental and social justice groups is advocating for a YIMBY strategy for mor... → By Joe Cortright 8.9.2023
The Week Observed, October 13, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Britain's Caste system of transportation. In a cynical ploy to revive the Conservative Party's flagging electoral hopes, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has engaged in some blatant pro-mot... → By Joe Cortright 8.9.2023
The Week Observed, March 22, 2024 What City Observatory did this week The high cost of covering freeways. The latest fashion in highway urbanism is "capping" freeways. In theory, highway builders claim that capping freeways will repair past damage and... → By Joe Cortright 22.3.2024
The Week Observed, March 15, 2024 What City Observatory did this week Abandoning road pricing monkey-wrenches state transportation, traffic reduction and climate plans. This week, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek terminated Oregon's Regional Mobility Pricing ... → By Joe Cortright 15.3.2024
The Week Observed, March 8, 2024 What City Observatory did this week A yawning chasm in neighborhood distress among metro areas. Almost every metropolitan area has some neighborhoods that face serious economic distress, but the patterns of distress vary ... → By Joe Cortright 8.3.2024
The Week Observed, March 1, 2024 What City Observatory Did this Week Is it time to address the problem of "Missing Massive" housing? This past week marked the latest convening of YIMBYTown, this year, held in Austin, Texas. One of the perennial topic... → By Joe Cortright 1.3.2024
The Week Observed, February 16, 2024 Must Read The freeway cap mirage. Don't like freeways? Let's just cover up the problem. It's increasingly popular to try to repair the damage done to urban neighborhoods by "capping" freeways: building a cover so ... → By Joe Cortright 14.2.2024
The Week Observed, February 9, 2024 What City Observatory did this week Three big flaws in ODOT’s Highway Cost Allocation Study. Some of the most important policy decisions are buried deep in seemingly technocratic documents. Case-in-point: Oregon's... → By Joe Cortright 9.2.2024
The Week Observed, February 2, 2024 Must Read How CalTrans cheated on its environmental reporting. Some months back, former Deputy Director of CalTrans,Jeanie Ward-Waller blew the whistle on the agency's effort to evade environmental laws and illegally us... → By Joe Cortright 2.2.2024
The Week Observed, January 5, 2024 What City Observatory did this week A $9 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement Project? Just 13 months after raising the price of the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) project by more than 50 percent, the Oregon and W... → By Joe Cortright 4.1.2024
The Week Observed, December 22, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Bad data. What appears, at first glance, to be a big decline in trip-making is really an object lesson in failing to read the footnotes. Every five years or so, the US Department of... → By Joe Cortright 22.12.2023
The Week Observed, December 15, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Exaggerated Benefits, Omitted Costs: The Interstate Bridge Boondoggle. A $7.5 billion highway boondoggle doesn’t meet the basic test of cost-effectiveness. The Interstate Bridge... → By Joe Cortright 15.12.2023
The Week Observed, December 8, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Tolling i-5 will produce massive traffic diversion. The proposed I-5 Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) Project will be paid for in part by $2.80 to $4.30 tolls charged to travelers... → By Joe Cortright 8.12.2023
The Week Observed, December 1, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Secret plans show ODOT is planning a 10-lane freeway in the Rose Quarter. City Observatory has obtained previously un-released plans showing that the $1.9 billion I-5 Rose Quarter pro... → By Joe Cortright 1.12.2023
The Week Observed, November 17, 2023 What City Observatory did this week 5 million miles wide of the mark.Portland's regional government Metro, has proposed a regional transportation plan (RTP) that purports to achieve state and regional policies to reduce g... → By Joe Cortright 16.11.2023
The Week Observed, November 10, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Snow-Job: Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) threatens to slash snow-plowing and other safety maintenance unless it is given more money, while spending billions on a handful o... → By Joe Cortright 10.11.2023
The Week Observed, November 3, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Killer off-ramps. The Oregon Department of Transportation's $1.9 billion I-5 Rose Quarter widening has been repeatedly (and falsely) portrayed as a "safety" project, but the latest re... → By Joe Cortright 3.11.2023
The Week Observed, October 27, 2023 What City Observatory did this week More climate fraud in Portland Metro's proposed regional transportation plan. We branded Metro's proposed Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) a climate fraud because in falsely claimed... → By Joe Cortright 8.9.2023
The Week Observed, September 8, 2023 What City Observatory did this week What apartment consolidation in New York tells us about housing markets and gentrification. A new study shows that over the past several decades, New York City lost more than 100,000 ... → By Joe Cortright 8.9.2023
The Week Observed, September 1, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Rose Quarter: Death throes of a bungled boondoggle. For years, we've been following the tortured Oregon Department of Transportation Plans to widen a 1.5 mile stretch of I-5 near do... → By Joe Cortright 28.8.2023
The Week Observed, August 25, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Metro's Climate-Denial Regional Transportation Plan. Portland's regional governtment, Metro, has published a draft Regional Transportation Plan, outlining priorities for transportatio... → By Joe Cortright 24.8.2023
The Week Observed, August 18, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Climate fraud in the Portland Metro RTP. Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan rationalizes spending billions on freeway expansion by publishing false estimates and projections of gr... → By Joe Cortright 18.8.2023
The Week Observed, August 11, 2023 Must Read Some Texas-sized greenwashing for highway widening in Austin. TXDOT is aiming to spend close to $5 billion to widen I-35 through downtown Austin, and to sweeten the deal, they're producing project renderings s... → By Joe Cortright 11.8.2023
The Week Observed, August 4, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Eating local: Why independent, local restaurants are a key indicator of city vitality. Jane Jacobs noted decades ago that“The greatest asset a city can have is something that is d... → By Joe Cortright 4.8.2023
The Week Observed, July 28, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Myth-busting: Idling and greenhouse gas emissions. Highway boosters are fond of claiming that they can help fight climate change by widening highways so that cars don't have to spen... → By Joe Cortright 28.7.2023
The Week Observed, July 21, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Few highway construction dollars for Black-owned firms in Oregon. The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) is falling short of its own goals of contracting with disadvantaged bu... → By Joe Cortright 23.7.2023
The Week Observed, July 14, 2023 What City Observatory did this week We have an in-depth series of reports on the Oregon Department of Transportation's imploding I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project. The cost of the I-5 Rose Quarter project has n... → By Joe Cortright 14.7.2023
The Week Observed, July 7, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Yet another exploding whale: One of the Internet's most popular videos shows employees of the Oregon Department of Transportation blowing up a dead whale carcass stranded on an Ocean ... → By Joe Cortright 7.7.2023
The Week Observed, June 23, 2023 What City Observatory did this week We took the week off to celebrate the Summer Solstice and gorge on Hood strawberries! We'll be back next week. Must Read The amazing non-appearance of Carmageddon. Echoing th... → By Joe Cortright 21.6.2023
The Week Observed, June 16, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Carmageddon does a no-show in Philly. A tanker truck caught fire and the ensuing blaze caused a section of I-95 in Philadelphia to collapse. This key roadway may be out of commissio... → By Joe Cortright 16.6.2023
The Week Observed, June 9, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Guest contributor Miriam Pinski observes that getting the prices right could produce dramatic improvements in how US transportation systems perform. New York is on the verge of implem... → By Joe Cortright 9.6.2023
The Week Observed, June 2, 2023 What City Observatory did this week What computer renderings really show about the Interstate Bridge Replacement Project: It's in trouble. The Interstate Bridge Project has released—after years of delay—computer gra... → By Joe Cortright 5.6.2023
The Week Observed, May 26, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Pricing is a better, cheaper fix for congestion at the I-5 Rose Quarter. The Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to squander $1.45 billion to widen about a mile and a hal... → By Joe Cortright 26.5.2023
The Week Observed, May 19, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Rose Quarter tolls: Available, but not foreseeable? There's a glaring--and illegal--contradiction in the planning for the Oregon Department of Transportation's $1.45 billion Rose Qu... → By Joe Cortright 19.5.2023
The Week Observed, May 12, 2023 What City Observatory did this week There’s plenty of time to fix the Interstate Bridge Project. Contrary to claims made by OregonDOT and WSDOT officials, the federal government allows considerable flexibility in fundin... → By Joe Cortright 12.5.2023
The Week Observed, May 5, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Why can't Oregon DOT tell the truth? Oregon legislators asked the state transportation department a simple question: How wide is the proposed $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacem... → By Joe Cortright 5.5.2023
The Week Observed, April 21, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Why should Oregonians subsidize suburban commuters from another state? Oregon is being asked to pay for half of the cost of widening the I-5 Interstate Bridge. Eighty percent of daily c... → By Joe Cortright 24.4.2023
The Week Observed, April 28, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Testifying on the Oregon Transportation Finance. City Observatory director Joe Cortright testified to the Oregon Legislature on HB 2098, a bill being proposed to fund bloated free... → By Joe Cortright 17.3.2023
The Week Observed, March 3, 2023 What City Observatory did this week More induced travel denial. Highway advocates deny or minimize the science of induced travel. We offer our rebuttal to a reason column posted at Planetizen, attempting to minimize... → By Joe Cortright 7.3.2023
The Week Observed, February 24, 2023 What City Observatory did this week IBR admits its bridge is too steep. After 15 years of telling the region that the only feasible alternative for crossing the Columbia River was a pair of side-by-side double-decker br... → By Joe Cortright 24.2.2023
The Week Observed, February 17, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Driving between Vancouver and Wilsonville at 5PM? ODOT plans to charge you $15. Under ODOT’s toll plans, A driving from Wilsonville to Vancouver will cost you as much as $15, each-w... → By Joe Cortright 17.2.2023
The Week Observed, February 10, 2023 What City Observatory did this week CEVP: Non-existent cost controls for the $7.5 billion IBR project. Oregon DOT has a history of enormous cost overruns, and just told the Oregon and Washington Legislatures that the co... → By Joe Cortright 10.2.2023
The Week Observed, January 20, 2023 What City Observatory did this week Dr. King: Socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. We're reminded this year of Dr. Martin Luther King's observation that our cities, and the public p... → By Joe Cortright 18.1.2023
The Week Observed, January 13, 2023 What City Observatory did this week A reporter's guide to congestion cost studies. For more than a decade, we and others have been taking a close, hard and critical look at congestion cost reports genera... → By Joe Cortright 13.1.2023
The Week Observed, January 6, 2023 What City Observatory did this week The case against the I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening. This week marked the end of public comment on the Supplemental Environmental Assessment for the Oregon Department of Tr... → By Joe Cortright 6.1.2023
The Week Observed, December 16, 2022 Editor's Note: Public Comment on the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Project Between now and January 4, 2023, the public will be asked to weigh in with its comments on the proposed I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Widening project. ... → By Joe Cortright 15.12.2022
The Week Observed, December 2, 2022 Editor's Note: Public Comment on the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Project In the next month, the public will be asked to weigh in with its comments on the proposed I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Widening project. If you're inte... → By Joe Cortright 2.12.2022
The Week Observed, November 4, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Risky bridges: If you're going to spend several billion dollars, you might want to get some independent expert advice. Oregon and Washington are on the verge of committing 5 billion d... → By Joe Cortright 4.11.2022
The Week Observed, October 28, 2022 What City Observatory did this week A toll policy primer for Oregon. The Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to finance billions in future road expansions with tolling. While we're enamored of road pricin... → By Joe Cortright 29.10.2022
The Week Observed, October 21, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Using phony safety claims to sell a billion dollar freeway widening. This past week, Sarah Pliner, a promising young Portland chef was killed when she and her bike were crushed by a t... → By Joe Cortright 21.10.2022
The Week Observed, October 14, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Two of the three candidates for Oregon Governor are Climate Deniers. Oregon will elect a new Governor next month, and two of the three candidates for the job insist on repeating the dis... → By Joe Cortright 14.10.2022
The Week Observed, July 8, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Building a bridge too low--again. In their effort to try to revive the failed Columbia River Crossing (a $5 billion freeway widening project between Portland and Vancouver) the Oregon... → By Joe Cortright 28.5.2022
The Week Observed, May 27, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Our apologies to City Observatory readers for our website outage on 19-22 May. More meaningless congestion pseudo science. A new study from the University of Maryland claims that... → By Joe Cortright 27.5.2022
The Week Observed, March 4, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Oregon crosses the road-pricing Rubicon. Starting this spring, motorists will pay a $2 toll to drive Oregon's historical Columbia River Gorge Highway. Instead of widening t... → By Joe Cortright 4.3.2022
The Week Observed, March 25, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Who's most vulnerable to high gas prices? Rising gas prices are a pain, but they hurt most if you live in a sprawling metro where you have to drive long distances to work, sho... → By Joe Cortright 25.3.2022
The Week Observed, March 18, 2022 Must read The problem with the "reckless driver" narrative. Strong Towns Chuck Marohn eloquently points out the deflection and denial inherent in the emerging "reckless driver" explanation for increasing car crashes and... → By Joe Cortright 17.3.2022
The Week Observed, March 11, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Freeway widening for whomst: Woke-washing the survey data. Highway builders are eager to cloak their road expansion projects in the rhetoric of equity and have become adep... → By Joe Cortright 11.3.2022
The Week Observed, February 25, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Freeway widening for whomst? Woke-washing is all the rage among those pushing highway projects these days, and there's no better example that Portland's I-5 "bridge replacem... → By Joe Cortright 28.2.2022
The Week Observed, January 7, 2022 What City Observatory did this week 1. Metro's failing climate strategy. Portland Metro’s Climate Smart Strategy, adopted in 2014, has been an abject failure. Portland area transportation greenhouse gasses a... → By Joe Cortright 7.1.2022
The Week Observed, January 14, 2022 What City Observatory did this week What does equity mean when we have a caste-based transportation system? Transportation and planning debates around the country increasingly ponder how we rectify long-standin... → By Joe Cortright 14.1.2022
The Week Observed, January 21, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Metro's "Don't look up" climate strategy. In the new film, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play scientists who find that the nation's leaders simply refuse to take s... → By Joe Cortright 21.1.2022
The Week Observed, January 28, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Why Portland shouldn't be moving elementary and middle schools to widen freeways. We're pleased to publish a guest commentary from Adah Crandall, a high school sophomore and... → By Joe Cortright 5.1.2022
The Week Observed, February 4, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Climate and our Groundhog Day Doom Loop. It's Groundhog Day—again—and we're stuck in exactly the same place when it comes to climate policy. Scientists are regularly... → By Joe Cortright 4.2.2022
The Week Observed, February 11, 2022 What City Observatory did this week The "replacement" bridge con. It's telling that perhaps the largest single consulting expense for Oregon and Washington transportation departments' efforts to revive the fai... → By Joe Cortright 11.2.2022
The Week Observed, February 18, 2022 What City Observatory did this week Oregon's highway agency rigs its projections to maximize revenue and downplay its culpability for climate challenge. ODOT has two different standards for forecasting: When it... → By Joe Cortright 18.2.2022
The Week Observed, December 17, 2021 What City Observatory did this week The financial fallout from Louisville's I-65 boondoggle. As we showed earlier, Kentucky and Indiana both wasted a billion dollars on doubling the capacity of I-65 across the... → By Joe Cortright 17.12.2021
The Week Observed, December 10, 2021 What City Observatory did this week 1. ODOT's real climate strategy: Pollution as usual. Oregon's highway builders are keeping two sets of books, one claiming that it cares about climate issues, the other shows that i... → By Joe Cortright 10.12.2021
The Week Observed, December 3, 2021 What City Observatory did this week How Portland powered Oregon's economic success. After decades of lagging the nation, Oregon's income now exceeds the national average. While some seem to think its a mystery: I... → By Joe Cortright 3.12.2021
The Week Observed, November 19, 2021 What City Observatory did this week Why we shouldn't be whining about higher gas prices. Gas prices are going up, and it’s annoying to have to pay more, but let’s take a closer look at how much we’re paying for... → By Joe Cortright 19.11.2021
The Week Observed, November 12, 2021 What City Observatory did this week Has this city discovered how to solve traffic congestion? Why aren't they telling everyone else how this works? A miracle in Louisville. [caption id="attachment_12554" al... → By Joe Cortright 15.11.2021
The Week Observed, November 5, 2021 What City Observatory did this week The Opposite of Planning: Why Portland's Metro government needs to turn down the highway department request for more money to plan future freeway widenings. On paper, and to admirer... → By Joe Cortright 5.11.2021
The Week Observed, October 22, 2021 What City Observatory did this week America's least and most segregated metro areas: Evidence from Census 2020. Racial segregation remains a chronic problem in US metropolitan areas. Data from Census 2020 provides a... → By Joe Cortright 22.10.2021
The Week Observed, October 15, 2021 What City Observatory did this week Ten reasons you can't trust DOT claims that widening highways reduces pollution. Highway departments are fond of ginning up traffic projections and air quality analyses claiming... → By Joe Cortright 15.10.2021
The Week Observed, September 24, 2021 What City Observatory did this week Freeway-widening grifters: Woke-washing, fraud and incompetence. The Oregon Department of Transportation has been trying to sell its $1.25 billion freeway widening project as a ... → By Joe Cortright 24.9.2021
The Week Observed, September 3, 2021 What City Observatory did this week Portland's Clean Energy Fund needs accountability. Portland voters approved a ballot measure creating a $60 million annual fund to invest in community-based clean energy projects, par... → By Joe Cortright 3.9.2021
The Week Observed, August 27, 2021 What City Observatory did this week Is the campus 100 percent clean energy? (Only if you don't count the cars and parking lots). Stanford University announced that its near to realizing a goal to move all of its campu... → By Joe Cortright 27.8.2021
The Week Observed, August 20, 2021 What City Observatory did this week Cost of Living and Auto Insurance. We often compare the affordability of different cities with a clear focus on housing prices and rents. This week at City Observatory we are interest... → By Joe Cortright 20.8.2021
The Week Observed, August 13, 2021 What City Observatory did this week 1. Tackling climate change will require electric cars, and a lot less driving. We're pleased to publish a guest commentary from CalYimby's Matthew Lewis looking at the challenge of ad... → By Joe Cortright 9.8.2021
The Week Observed, August 6, 2021 What City Observatory did this week America's berry best cities. It's the height of the summer fruit season and berries are ripening across the country. Nothing beats a fresh local berry in season. We've ranked the na... → By Joe Cortright 2.8.2021
The Week Observed, July 23, 2021 What City Observatory did this week Selling Oregon into highway bondage. Oregon is moving ahead with plans to issue hundreds of millions—and ultimately billions of dollars of debt to widen Portland-area freeways. An... → By Joe Cortright 23.7.2021
The Week Observed, July 9, 2021 What City Observatory did this week 1. Miami's double standard for charging road users. The City of Miami is hoping to make their streets a safer place for bikes and scooters by building protected lanes along three mile... → By Joe Cortright 9.7.2021
The Week Observed, July 2, 2021 What City Observatory did this week 1. The Texas Transportation Institute is back, and it's still wrong about traffic congestion. Every year or so, a group of researchers at Texas A&M University produce report purpo... → By Joe Cortright 3.7.2021
The Week Observed, June 25, 2021 What City Observatory did this week 1. Cars kill city neighborhoods. Across the nation, America's cities have been remade to accomodate the automobile. Freeways have been widened through city neighborhoods, demolishin... → By Eli Molloy 25.6.2021
The Week Observed, June 18, 2021 What City Observatory this week 1. Race and economic polarization. In the past several decades, racial segregation in the US has attenuated, but economic segregation has increased. This is nowhere more apparent than... → By Joe Cortright 17.6.2021
The Week Observed, June 4, 2021 What City Observatory this week What ultimately destroyed Tulsa's Greenwood neighborhood: Highways. This past week marked the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre. In 1921, a racist mob attacked and destroyed the B... → By Joe Cortright 4.6.2021
The Week Observed, May 28, 2021 What City Observatory this week 1. Why highway departments can and should build housing to mitigate road damage. For decades, American cities have been scarred and neighborhoods destroyed by highway construction project... → By Joe Cortright 28.5.2021
The Week Observed, March 26, 2021 What City Observatory this week 1. How ODOT destroyed Albina. Urban freeways have been lethal to neighborhoods, especially neighborhoods of color, in cities throughout the nation. While the construction of Interstate ... → By Joe Cortright 26.3.2021
The Week Observed, March 19, 2021 What City Observatory this week 1. An open letter to the Oregon Transportation Commission. For more than two years, City Observatory and others have been shining a bright light on the Oregon Department of Transportation... → By Joe Cortright 19.3.2021
The Week Observed, March 12, 2021 What City Observatory this week 1. The failure of Vision Zero. Like many regions, the Portland metropolitan area has embraced the idea of Vision Zero; a strategy of planning to take concrete steps over time to reduce th... → By Joe Cortright 7.3.2021
The Week Observed, March 5, 2021 What City Observatory this week 1. The fundamental global law of traffic congestion. For years, urbanists have stressed the concept of induced demand, based on the nearly universal observation that widening urban roadwa... → By Joe Cortright 5.3.2021
The Week Observed, January 8, 2021 What City Observatory this week 1. 2021 is when we have to get real about tackling climate change. We've boiled our analysis of the climate challenge down to four key points: Pledges alone won't accomplish anything... → By Joe Cortright 8.1.2021
The Week Observed, March 6, 2020 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... → By Joe Cortright 6.3.2020
The Week Observed, March 13, 2020 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... → By Joe Cortright 13.3.2020
The Week Observed, April 3, 2020 What City Observatory this week 1. Counting Covid- Cases in US Metro Areas. We've been updating our metro area tabulations of the number of reported Covid-19 cases on a daily basis. You can find our latest tabulations... → By Joe Cortright 3.4.2020
The Week Observed, April 17, 2020 What City Observatory this week 1. Regional Patterns of Covid-19 Incidence. The pandemic has struck every corner of the nation, but has clearly hit some areas harder than others. We've focused on those metro areas, like... → By Joe Cortright 17.4.2020
The Week Observed, April 24, 2020 What City Observatory this week 1. What the Covid-19 Shutdown teaches us about freeways. Everyone knows that speeds are up on urban roadways around the nation because of the stay-at-home orders to fight the pandemic. But ... → By Joe Cortright 24.4.2020
The Week Observed, June 12, 2020 What City Observatory did this week 1. Covid-19 rates are spiking in five cities. Stay-at-home policies and social distancing have dramatically slowed the spread of the pandemic in the US, but as many state's begin re-op... → By Joe Cortright 12.6.2020
The Week Observed, June 19, 2020 What City Observatory did this week 1. Youth Movement: Our latest CityReport. America's urban revival is being powered by the widespread and accelerating movement of well-educated young adults to the densest, most central... → By Joe Cortright 19.6.2020
The Week Observed, September 25, 2020 What City Observatory did this week 1. Why free parking is one of the most inequitable aspect of our transportation system. There's a lot of well-founded anger over the inequitable aspects of transportation: the burdens... → By Joe Cortright 25.9.2020
The Week Observed, October 2, 2020 What City Observatory did this week 1. Carmaggedon never comes, Portland edition. It's a favored myth that any reduction in road capacity will automatically trigger gridlock, and highway engineers regularly inveigh agains... → By Joe Cortright 2.10.2020
The Week Observed, October 9, 2020 What City Observatory did this week Let's fight congestion with a PR campaign. For decades, when pressed to do something to improve road safety, city and state transportation officials have responded with . . . marketin... → By Joe Cortright 9.10.2020
The Week Observed, October 16, 2020 What City Observatory did this week 1. Covid-19 is now worst in rural areas and red states. Early on in the pandemic, it seemed like everyone attributed the spread of the Coronavirus to big cities and density. It turns ou... → By Joe Cortright 16.10.2020
The Week Observed, December 18, 2020 What City Observatory did this week 1. Want lower rents? Build more housing! A new study from Germany provides more evidence that the fundamentals of economics are alive and well in the housing market. The study looks... → By Joe Cortright 18.12.2020
The Week Observed, December 11, 2020 What City Observatory did this week 1. The only reason many people drive is because we pay them to. There's an important insight from recent applications of tolling to urban highways. When asked to pay even a modest amoun... → By Joe Cortright 11.12.2020
The Week Observed, November 6, 2020 What City Observatory did this week 1. Achieving equitable transportation: Reallocate road space and price car travel. New York has recorded a kind of "Miracle on 14th Street." By largely banning through car traffic, its ... → By Joe Cortright 6.11.2020
The Week Observed, November 13, 2020 What City Observatory did this week 1. Seven reasons you should be optimistic about cities in a post-pandemic world. There's widespread pessimism about the future of cities. With the pandemic-induced advent of work-at-hom... → By Joe Cortright 13.11.2020
The Week Observed, November 30, 2020 What City Observatory did this week Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Gridlock Tuesday? The day after a nation celebrates its socially distanced "Zoom Thanksgiving" we'll look to see how the pandemic affects the traditional "... → By Joe Cortright 20.11.2020
The Week Observed, October 23, 2020 What City Observatory did this week 1. Now we are six. We marked City Observatory's sixth birthday this week, and took a few moments to reflect back on the journey, and to thank all those who helped us on our way, and to ... → By Joe Cortright 23.10.2020
The Week Observed, October 30, 2020 What City Observatory did this week Equity and Metro's $5 billion transportation bond. This week, Portland residents are voting on a proposed $5 billion payroll tax/bond measure to fund a range of transportation projects.... → By Joe Cortright 25.9.2020
The Week Observed, September 18, 2020 What City Observatory did this week 1. Lived segregation in US cities. Our standard measure of urban segregation, whether people reside in different neighborhoods, doesn't really capture the way people from different raci... → By Joe Cortright 18.9.2020
The Week Observed, September 11, 2020 What City Observatory did this week 1. Manufacturing consent for highway widening. In the early days of freeway battles, state highway departments were power blind and tone-deaf, and citizen activists often triumphed in... → By Joe Cortright 4.9.2020
The Week Observed, September 4, 2020 What City Observatory did this week Why most pedestrian infrastructure is really car infrastructure. One of the most misleading terms you'll hear in transportation is "multi-modal" which in practice means a highway for ca... → By Joe Cortright 4.9.2020
The Week Observed, August 28, 2020 What City Observatory did this week The case against Metro's $5 billion transportation bond. Portland's regional government, Metro, is asking voters to approve a $5 billion package of transportation improvements, to be fu... → By Joe Cortright 28.8.2020
The Week Observed, August 21, 2020 What City Observatory did this week America's most and least segregated cities. Residential racial segregation is a fundamental and persistent aspect of system racism in the United States. Segregation cuts of disfavored g... → By Joe Cortright 21.8.2020
The Week Observed, August 7, 2020 What City Observatory did this week 1. Is it random, or is it Zumper? Are rents going up or down in your city? Listicles showing which places have the biggest jumps (or declines) in rents are a perennial media favorite,... → By Joe Cortright 7.8.2020
The Week Observed, July 31 2020 What City Observatory did this week 1. The abject failure of Portland's Climate Action Plan. Last month, Portland issued the final report on its 2015 Climate Action Plan. It emphasizes that the city took action on three-q... → By Joe Cortright 31.7.2020
The Week Observed, July 24 2020 What City Observatory did this week The exodus that never happened. You've probably seen stories bouncing around the media for the past few months claiming that fears that density makes people more susceptible to the pand... → By Joe Cortright 21.7.2020
The Week Observed, July 17, 2020 What City Observatory did this week Dominos falling on Portland's Rose Quarter freeway widening project. In the space of just a few hours two weeks ago, local political support for an $800 million freeway widening project... → By Joe Cortright 18.7.2020
The Week Observed, July 10, 2020 What City Observatory did this week CityBeat: NPR urban flight story. The pack animals of the media have settled on a single, oft-repeated narrative about cities and Covid-19; that fear of the virus will lead people to mo... → By Joe Cortright 10.7.2020
The Week Observed, June 26, 2020 What City Observatory did this week When NIMBYs win, everyone loses. Two land use cases from different sides of the country are in the news this week. In both cases, local opponents of new housing development have succeed... → By Joe Cortright 26.6.2020
The Week Observed, June 5, 2020 What City Observatory did this week 1. Covid-19 and Cities: An uneven pandemic. We've been following the progress of the Covid-19 virus in the nation's metropolitan areas for the past three months, and with the benefit ... → By Joe Cortright 5.6.2020
The Week Observed, May 29, 2020 What City Observatory did this week 1. LA Covid correlates with overcrowding and poverty, not density. City Observatory is pleased to publish a guest analysis and commentary from Abundant Housing LA's Anthony Dedousis.... → By Joe Cortright 29.5.2020
The Week Observed, May 22, 2020 What City Observatory this week 1. Postcards from the Edges: Looking at the relationship between density and the pandemic. There's a widely circulating meme associating urban density with the spread of the Covid-19 viru... → By Joe Cortright 22.5.2020
The Week Observed, May 15, 2020 What City Observatory did this week 1. City Beat: We push back on a New York Times story claiming that people are decamping New York City on account of pandemic fears. You can always find an anecdote about someone lea... → By Joe Cortright 15.5.2020
The Week Observed, May 1, 2020 What City Observatory this week Our updated analysis of the prevalence of Covid-19 in US metro areas. It continues to be the case that the pandemic is most severe in the Northeast Corridor. The New York Metro area is ... → By Joe Cortright 1.5.2020
The Week Observed, April 10, 2020 What City Observatory this week 1. What cities are showing us about the progression of the Covid-19 pandemic. In an important sense, each large US metro area is a separate test case of the path of the Covid-19 virus. By... → By Joe Cortright 10.4.2020
The Week Observed, March 20, 2020 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... → By Joe Cortright 20.3.2020
The Week Observed, March 27, 2020 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... → By Joe Cortright 27.3.2020
The Week Observed, February 28, 2020 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... → By Joe Cortright 28.2.2020
The Week Observed, February 21, 2020 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... → By Joe Cortright 21.2.2020
The Week Observed, February 7, 2020 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... → By Joe Cortright 7.2.2020
The Week Observed, January 31, 2020 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... → By Joe Cortright 31.1.2020
The Week Observed, December 13, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 10.12.2019
The Week Observed, December 20, 2019 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 20.12.2019
The Week Observed, December 6, 2019 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 6.12.2019
The Week Observed, November 22, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 22.11.2019
The Week Observed, November 15, 2019 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 15.11.2019
The Week Observed, November 8, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 8.11.2019
The Week Observed, November 1, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 1.11.2019
The Week Observed, October 18, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 18.10.2019
The Week Observed, October 11, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 11.10.2019
The Week Observed, October 4, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 4.10.2019
The Week Observed, August 30, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 30.8.2019
The Week Observed, September 13, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 13.9.2019
The High Cost of Segregation 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,... → By Joe Cortright 29.3.2017
The Week Observed, April 7, 2017 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. ... → By Joe Cortright 7.4.2017
The Week Observed, April 14, 2017 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 14.4.2017
The Week Observed, April 21, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 21.4.2017
The Week Observed, June 9, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 9.6.2017
The Week Observed, June 23, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 23.6.2017
The Week Observed, June 30, 2017 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 23.6.2017
The Week Observed, August 11, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 11.8.2017
The Week Observed, July 28, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 28.7.2017
The Week Observed, October 13, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 13.10.2017
The Week Observed, November 10, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 10.11.2017
The Week Observed, January 26, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 26.1.2018
The Week Observed, February 9, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 9.2.2018
The Week Observed, February 16, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 16.2.2018
The Week Observed, March 9, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 9.3.2018
The Week Observed, April 6, 2018 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. ... → By Joe Cortright 3.4.2018
The Week Observed, April 13, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 13.4.2018
The Week Observed, April 20, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 3.4.2018
The Week Observed, June 15, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 15.6.2018
The Week Observed, July 13, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 13.7.2018
The Week Observed, July 27, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 27.7.2018
The Week Observed, September 14, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 14.9.2018
The Week Observed, September 21, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 21.9.2018
The Week Observed, September 28, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 28.9.2018
The Week Observed, December 7, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 7.12.2018
The Week Observed, September 6, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 6.9.2019
The Week Observed, January 11, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 11.1.2019
The Week Observed, January 18, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 18.1.2019
The Week Observed, January 25, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 25.1.2019
The Week Observed, February 1, 2019 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 1.2.2019
The Week Observed, February 8, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 8.2.2019
The Week Observed, May 3, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 3.5.2019
The Week Observed, June 14, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 6.6.2019
The Week Observed, June 7, 2019 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 7.6.2019
The Week Observed, June 21, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 21.6.2019
The Week Observed, June 28, 2019 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 28.6.2019
The Week Observed, July 5, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 8.7.2019
The Week Observed, July 12, 2019 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.... → By Joe Cortright 12.7.2019
The Week Observed, July 19, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 27.6.2019
The Week Observed, August 23, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 23.8.2019
The Week Observed, August 30, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 30.8.2019
The Week Observed, August 16, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 16.8.2019
The Week Observed, August 9, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 9.8.2019
The Week Observed, August 2, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 2.8.2019
The Week Observed, July 26, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 26.7.2019
The Week Observed, May 24, 2019 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. ... → By Joe Cortright 24.5.2019
The Week Observed, May 31, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 31.5.2019
The Week Observed, May 17, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 17.5.2019
The Week Observed, May 10, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 10.5.2019
The Week Observed, April 26, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 26.4.2019
The Week Observed, April 19, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 19.4.2019
The Week Observed, April 5, 2019 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 5.4.2019
The Week Observed, April 12, 2019 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 12.4.2019
The Week Observed, February 15, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 4.1.2019
The Week Observed, March 29, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 29.3.2019
The Week Observed, March 22, 2019 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 22.3.2019
The Week Observed, March 15, 2019 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 15.3.2019
The Week Observed, March 1, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 1.3.2019
The Week Observed, March 8, 2019 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 8.3.2019
The Week Observed, February 22, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 22.2.2019
The Week Observed, December 14, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 14.12.2018
The Week Observed, December 21, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 21.12.2018
The Week Observed, November 16, 2018 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.... → By Joe Cortright 16.11.2018
The Week Observed, January 4, 2019 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... → By Joe Cortright 4.1.2019
The Week Observed, November 2, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 2.11.2018
The Week Observed, November 9, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 9.11.2018
The Week Observed, November 23, 2018 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.... → By Joe Cortright 23.11.2018
The Week Observed, October 12, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 12.10.2018
The Week Observed, October 19, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 19.10.2018
The Week Observed, October 26, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 26.10.2018
The Week Observed, September 7, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 7.9.2018
The Week Observed, August 31, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 31.8.2018
The Week Observed, August 24, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 24.8.2018
The Week Observed, August 17, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 17.8.2018
The Week Observed, August 10, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 10.8.2018
The Week Observed, July 20, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 20.7.2018
The Week Observed, August 3, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 3.8.2018
The Week Observed, June 29, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 29.6.2018
The Week Observed, July 6, 2018 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 6.7.2018
The Week Observed, June 22, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 22.6.2018
The Week Observed, June 1, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 1.6.2018
The Week Observed, June 8, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 8.6.2018
The Week Observed, May 18, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 18.5.2018
The Week Observed, May 11, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 11.5.2018
The Week Observed, May 4, 2018 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 4.5.2018
The Week Observed, April 27, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 27.4.2018
The Week Observed, March 30, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 30.3.2018
The Week Observed, March 16, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 16.3.2018
The Week Observed, March 23, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 23.3.2018
The Week Observed, February 23, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 23.2.2018
The Week Observed, January 19, 2018 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... → By Joe Cortright 19.1.2018
The Week Observed, December 15, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 15.12.2017
The Week Observed, December 22, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 22.12.2017
The Week Observed, January 12, 2018 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 12.1.2018
The Week Observed, January 5, 2018 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 5.1.2018
The Week Observed, December 8, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 8.12.2017
The Week Observed, December 1, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 1.12.2017
The Week Observed, November 3, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 3.11.2017
The Week Observed, November 17, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 17.11.2017
The Week Observed, October 27, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 27.10.2017
The Week Observed, October 6, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 6.10.2017
The Week Observed, October 20, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 20.10.2017
The Week Observed, September 22, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 22.9.2017
The Week Observed, September 29, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 29.9.2017
The Week Observed, September 15, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 15.9.2017
The Week Observed, September 1, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 1.9.2017
The Week Observed, September 8, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 8.9.2017
The Week Observed, August 25, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 25.8.2017
The Week Observed, July 14, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 14.7.2017
The Week Observed, July 21, 2017 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 26.7.2017
The Week Observed, July 7, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 7.7.2017
The Week Observed, August 18, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 18.8.2017
The Week Observed, June 2, 2017 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 2.6.2017
The Week Observed, June 16, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 16.6.2017
The Week Observed, May 26, 2017 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 26.5.2017
The Week Observed, May 5, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 5.5.2017
The Week Observed, March 17, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 17.3.2017
The Week Observed, March 31, 2017 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 31.3.2017
The Week Observed, March 24, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 24.3.2017
The Week Observed, March 3, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 3.3.2017
The Week Observed, March 10, 2017 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 10.3.2017
The Week Observed, February 17, 2017 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 17.2.2017
The Week Observed, February 10, 2017 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 10.2.2017
The Week Observed, February 3, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 3.2.2017
The Week Observed, February 24, 2017 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 24.2.2017
The Week Observed, May 19, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 19.5.2017
The Week Observed, January 20, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 20.1.2017
The Week Observed, January 27, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 27.1.2017
The Week Observed, January 6, 2017 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. ... → By Joe Cortright 6.1.2017
The Week Observed, January 13, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 13.1.2017
The Week Observed, December 23, 2016 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... → By Joe Cortright 23.12.2016
The Week Observed, December 30, 2016 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... → By Joe Cortright 30.12.2016
The Week Observed, December 16, 2016 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 16.12.2016
The Week Observed, December 9, 2016 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... → By Joe Cortright 9.12.2016
The Week Observed, November 25, 2016 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... → By Joe Cortright 25.11.2016
The Week Observed, November 18, 2016 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... → By Joe Cortright 18.11.2016
The Week Observed, November 11, 2016 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... → By Joe Cortright 11.11.2016
The Week Observed: November 4, 2016 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... → By Joe Cortright 4.11.2016
The Week Observed: October 28, 2016 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 28.10.2016
The Week Observed: October 14, 2016 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... → By Joe Cortright 14.10.2016
The Week Observed: October 21, 2016 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... → By Joe Cortright 21.10.2016
The Week Observed: October 7, 2016 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 7.10.2016
The Week Observed: September 30, 2016 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... → By Joe Cortright 30.9.2016
The Week Observed: September 23, 2016 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... → By Joe Cortright 23.9.2016
The Week Observed: Sept. 16, 2016 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... → By Michael Andersen 16.9.2016
The Week Observed: Sept. 9, 2016 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... → By Joe Cortright 9.9.2016
The Week Observed: Sept. 2, 2016 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... → By Michael Andersen 2.9.2016
The Week Observed: Aug. 26, 2016 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... → By Michael Andersen 26.8.2016
The Week Observed: Aug. 19, 2016 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... → By Michael Andersen 19.8.2016
The Week Observed: Aug. 12, 2016 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 ... → By Michael Andersen 12.8.2016
The Week Observed: Aug. 5, 2016 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... → By Michael Andersen 5.8.2016
The Week Observed: July 29, 2016 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... → By Joe Cortright 29.7.2016
The Week Observed: July 22, 2016 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 22.7.2016
The Week Observed: July 15, 2016 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,... → By Daniel Hertz 15.7.2016
The Week Observed: July 8, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 8.7.2016
The Week Observed: July 1, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 1.7.2016
The Week Observed: June 24, 2016 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 ... → By Daniel Hertz 24.6.2016
The Week Observed, December 2, 2016 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... → By Joe Cortright 2.12.2016
The Week Observed: June 17, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 17.6.2016
The Week Observed: June 10, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 10.6.2016
The Week Observed: June 3, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 3.6.2016
The Week Observed: May 27, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 27.5.2016
The Week Observed: May 20, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 20.5.2016
The Week Observed: May 13, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 13.5.2016
The Week Observed: May 6, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 6.5.2016
The Week Observed: April 29, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 29.4.2016
The Week Observed: April 22, 2016 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 ... → By Daniel Hertz 22.4.2016
The Week Observed: April 15, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 15.4.2016
The Week Observed: April 8, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 8.4.2016
The Week Observed: April 1, 2016 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.... → By Daniel Hertz 1.4.2016
The Week Observed: March 25, 2016 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 ... → By Daniel Hertz 25.3.2016
The Week Observed: March 18, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 18.3.2016
The Week Observed: March 11, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 11.3.2016
The Week Observed: March 4, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 4.3.2016
The Week Observed: February 26, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 26.2.2016
The Week Observed: February 19, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 19.2.2016
The Week Observed: February 12, 2016 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 ... → By Daniel Hertz 12.2.2016
The Week Observed: February 5, 2016 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, ... → By Daniel Hertz 5.2.2016
The Week Observed: January 29, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 29.1.2016
The Week Observed: January 22, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 22.1.2016
The Week Observed: January 15, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 15.1.2016
The Week Observed: January 8, 2016 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... → By Daniel Hertz 8.1.2016
The Week Observed: December 24, 2015 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 ... → By Daniel Hertz 24.12.2015
The Week Observed: December 18, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 18.12.2015
The Week Observed: December 11, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 11.12.2015
The Week Observed: December 4, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 4.12.2015
The Week Observed: November 27, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 27.11.2015
The Week Observed: November 20, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 20.11.2015
The Week Observed: November 13, 2015 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 ... → By Daniel Hertz 13.11.2015
The Week Observed: November 6, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 6.11.2015
The Week Observed: October 30, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 30.10.2015
The Week Observed: October 23, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 23.10.2015
Happy birthday to us! 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... → By Joe Cortright 15.10.2015
The Week Observed: October 16, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 16.10.2015
The Week Observed: October 9, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 9.10.2015
The Week Observed: October 2, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 2.10.2015
The Week Observed: September 25, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 25.9.2015
The Week Observed, April 28, 2017 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... → By Joe Cortright 28.4.2017
The Week Observed: September 18, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 18.9.2015
The Week Observed: September 11, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 11.9.2015
What do we know about neighborhood change, gentrification, and displacement? 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... → By Daniel Hertz 9.9.2015
The Week Observed: September 4, 2015 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 ... → By Daniel Hertz 4.9.2015
The Week Observed: August 28, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 28.8.2015
The Week Observed, August 21, 2015 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 21.8.2015
The Week Observed: August 14, 2015 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... → By Joe Cortright 14.8.2015
The Week Observed: August 7, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 7.8.2015
The Week Observed: July 31, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 31.7.2015
The Week Observed: July 24, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 24.7.2015
The Week Observed: July 17, 2015 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 ... → By Daniel Hertz 17.7.2015
The Week Observed: July 10, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 10.7.2015
The Week Observed: July 3, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 3.7.2015
The Week Observed: June 26, 2015 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... → By Daniel Hertz 26.6.2015
Search Results for: "The Week Observed"
The Week Observed, September 27, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, September 20, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, January 10, 2020
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... →
The Week Observed, January 24, 2020
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... →
The Week Observed, January 12, 2024
What City Observatory did this week The pernicious myth of "Naturally Occurring" Affordable Housing. One of the most dangerous and misleading concepts in housing reared its ugly head in the form a a new publication from... →
The Week Observed, January 26, 2024
What City Observatory this week Robert Moses strikes again: One of the most infamous decisions of "The Power Broker" was to build the overpasses on the Long Island Expressway too low to allow city buses to use the roadw... →
The Week Observed, January 19, 2024
What City Observatory this week Why does it take four years and $200 million for consultants to serve up a warmed-over version of the Columbia River Crossing? The Interstate Bridge Replacement Project’s director admit... →
The Week Observed, January 15, 2024
What City Observatory this week 1. The Urban Institute gets inclusion backwards. The Urban Institute has released an updated set of estimates that purport to measure which US cities are the most inclusive. The report i... →
The Week Observed, January 22, 2021
What City Observatory this week Institutionalized housing discrimination. A recent study of housing discrimination in Detroit came to a seemingly surprising conclusion: Fair housing complaints were less likely to be fil... →
The Week Observed, January 29, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Why Portland's Rose Quarter Freeway widening will increase greenhouse gas emissions. The Oregon Department of Transportation hashas falsely claimed its $800 million freeway widening pr... →
The Week Observed, February 5, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Calculating induced travel. Widening freeways to reduce traffic congestion in dense urban areas inevitably fails because of the scientifically demonstrated problem of induced demand; som... →
The Week Observed, February 12, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. How housing segregation reduces Black wealth. Black-owned homes are valued at a discount to all housing, but the disparity is worst in highly segregated metro areas. There's a st... →
The Week Observed, February 19, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Covid migration: Disproportionately young, economically stressed and people of color. Data shows the moves prompted by Covid-19 are more reflective of economic distress for the vulne... →
The Week Observed, February 26, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Revealed: Oregon Department of Transportation's secret plans for a ten-lane I-5 freeway at the Rose Quarter. For years, ODOT has been claiming that its $800 million freeway widening pr... →
The Week Observed, April 2, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. How the Oregon Department of Transportation destroyed a Portland neighborhood, Part 2: The Moses Meat Axe. We continue our historical look at the role that freeway construction (and ... →
The Week Observed, April 9, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. How ODOT destroyed Albina: Part 3 the Phantom Freeway. Even a freeway that never got built played a key role in demolishing part of Portland's Albina neighborhood. In parts 1 and 2... →
The Week Observed, April 16, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Taking Tubman: The Oregon Department of Transportation is planning to widen the Interstate 5 freeway in Portland into the backyard of Harriet Tubman Middle School. The $800 million w... →
The Week Observed, April 30, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Restorative justice without funding is a sham. Portland's Albina neighborhood was decimated by the construction of three Oregon Department of Transportation highway projects in the 195... →
The Week Observed, April 23, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Fighting climate change is inherently equitable. While there's a growing recognition of the existential threat posed by climate change, it's becoming increasingly frequent to pit equity ... →
The Week Observed, May 7, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. It's not a bridge replacement, it's a 5 mile long, 12 lane wide freeway that just happens to cross a river. The Oregon and Washington highway departments are trying to revive the faile... →
The Week Observed, May 14, 2021
What City Observatory this week Don't be fooled again. The Oregon and Washington state highway departments are up to their old tricks in trying to push a multi-billion dollar highway building boondoggle in the POrtland ... →
The Week Observed, May 21, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Needed: A bolder, better building back. In response to an invitation from its authors, we take a look at a "grand bargain" proposed by Patrick Doherty and Chris Leinberger for breaki... →
The Week Observed, July 16, 2021
What City Observatory did this week An open letter to Secretary Pete Buttigieg on his visit to Oregon. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg came to Oregon this week to look at some local transportation innovations. ... →
The Week Observed, July 30, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Oregon Department of Transportation's Climate Fig-Leaf. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in Oregon, and the state's Department of Transportation is—yet again... →
The Week Observed, September 17, 2021
What City Observatory did this week The cost of Oregon DOT's Rose Quarter project has nearly tripled to $1.25 billion. Just four years ago, the Oregon Department of transportation sold its mile-and-a-half long I-5 freew... →
The Week Observed, September 10, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Talkin' 'bout my gentrification. Jerusalem Demsas of Vox has a thoughtful synthesis of what we know about gentrification. If we're concerned about poverty and inequality, gentrifi... →
The Week Observed, April 1, 2022
What City Observatory did this week 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. ... →
The Week Observed, April 15, 2022
What City Observatory did this week A universal basic income . . . for cars. One of the most widely discussed alternatives for tackling poverty and inequality head on is the idea of a "Universal Basic Income"--a payment... →
The Week Observed, April 22, 2022
What City Observatory did this week How sprawl and tax evasion are driving demands for wider freeways. The Oregon and Washington Departments of Transportation are proposing to spend roughly $5 billion to widen a 5 mile ... →
The Week Observed, April 29, 2022
What City Observatory did this week The folly of the frog ferry. One bane of transportation policy discussions is the tendency to believe that miracle technical fixes—self-driving cars, personal aircraft, the Segway, ... →
The Week Observed, May 6, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Ten questions that deserve answers before making a multi-billion dollar decision. The Portland metro area is being asked by the Oregon and Washington Departments of Transportation to gi... →
The Week Observed, May 13, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Just Say "No" to freeway widening zealots. George Santayana meet David Bragdon: Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat the failures of the past. A year ago, we pu... →
The Week Observed, May 20, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Another exploding whale: The cost of the I-205 bridge project doubles in four years. Famously in the 1960s, the Oregon State Highway Department tried to dispose of the carcass of a wh... →
The Week Observed, June 10, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Oregon DOT's "reign of error"—chronic cost overruns on highway projects. The Oregon Department of Transportation is moving forward with a multi-billion dollar freeway expansion plan... →
The Week Observed, June 17, 2022
What City Observatory did this week There's nothing green about free parking, no matter how many solar panels you put on the garage. The US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory brags about its sus... →
The Week Observed, June 24, 2022
What City Observatory did this week The economics of fruit, time, and place. It's berry time in Portland, and that got us thinking about how special local products are in defining quality of life. Recently, Paul Krugm... →
The Week Observed, July 1, 2022
Must read The most gas guzzling states. The sting of higher gas prices depends on where you live, not so much because of the variation in prices, but because in some states, you just have drive a lot more. The website Q... →
The Week Observed, July 15, 2022
What City Observatory did this week A Bridge too low. The Oregon DOT is fundamentally misrepresenting the process and legal standards for setting the height of a proposed new multi-billion dollar I-5 bridge across the C... →
The Week Observed, July 22, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Failing to learn from the failure of the Columbia River Crossing. Last week, Portland's Metro Council voted 6-1 to wave on the Oregon Department of Transportation's plan for a multi-b... →
The Week Observed, July 29, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Fix it Last. The Oregon Department of Transportation claims that it has a "Fix-it" first policy--prioritizing spending funds to preserve existing roads and bridges. But their actual... →
The Week Observed, November 18, 2022
What City Observatory did this week The Rose Quarter’s Big U-Turn: Deadman’s Curve? The redesign of the I-5 Rose Quarter project creates a hazardous new hairpin off-ramp from Interstate 5. This supposed ... →
The Week Observed, November 11, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Risky bridges. The Oregon and Washington highway departments are blundering ahead with a $5 billion plan to widen I-5 between Portland and Vancouver, and are making many of the same m... →
The Week Observed, February 3, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Groundhog's Day for Climate. So you think you're not Bill Murray in the classic "Groundhog's Day?" Oregonians, ask yourself: are we anywhere closer to seriously addressi... →
The Week Observed, January 27, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Driving stakes, selling bonds, overdosing on debt. The Oregon Department of Transportation is following a well trodden path to push the state toward a massive highway expans... →
The Week Observed, March 10, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Why does a $500 million bridge replacement cost $7.5 billion? For the past several years, the Oregon and Washington highway departments have been pushing for construction of somet... →
The Week Observed, March 17, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Why does a $500 million bridge cost $7.5 billion? For almost two decades the Oregon and Washington highway departments have been saying they want to replace the I-5 bridges over t... →
The Week Observed, March 23, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Oregon's transportation finance in crisis: Testimony to the Joint Ways and Means Committee. On March 16, City Observatory's Joe Cortright testified to the Oregon Legislature's b... →
The Week Observed, March 31, 2023
What City Observatory did this week What are they hiding? Oregon and Washington are being asked to spend $7.5 billion on a giant bridge: Why won’t anyone show pictures of what it would look like? The Oregon ... →
The Week Observed, April 7, 2023
What City Observatory did this week IBR's plan to sabotage the "moveable span" alternative. The proposed $7.5 billion Portland area freeway widening project is supposedly looking at a moveable span option to avoid i... →
The Week Observed, April 14, 2023
What City Observatory did this week The case against the Interstate Bridge Project. We offer 16 reasons why Oregon and Washington lawmakers should question the current plans for the proposed $7.5 billion I-5 freeway... →
The Week Observed, June 30, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Scratch one flat top! That was the famous cry of US Naval aviators, when, early in World War II they chalked up their first victory, sinking the Japanese aircraft carrier Shoho. Por... →
The Week Observed, September 15, 2023
What City Observatory did this week This is what victory looks like. Freeway fighting is hard, drawn-out work. StateDOTs and their allies have vast funding for public relations campaigns to sell giant projects; citize... →
The Week Observed, October 6, 2023
What City Observatory did this week What if we regulated new car ownership the same way we do new housing? Getting a building permit for a new house is difficult, expensive, and in some places, simply impossible. In c... →
The Week Observed, October 20, 2023
Must Read Portland: Four Floors and Corner Stores--Upzoning for urban development and housing affordability. A coalition of community, enviornmental and social justice groups is advocating for a YIMBY strategy for mor... →
The Week Observed, October 13, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Britain's Caste system of transportation. In a cynical ploy to revive the Conservative Party's flagging electoral hopes, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has engaged in some blatant pro-mot... →
The Week Observed, March 22, 2024
What City Observatory did this week The high cost of covering freeways. The latest fashion in highway urbanism is "capping" freeways. In theory, highway builders claim that capping freeways will repair past damage and... →
The Week Observed, March 15, 2024
What City Observatory did this week Abandoning road pricing monkey-wrenches state transportation, traffic reduction and climate plans. This week, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek terminated Oregon's Regional Mobility Pricing ... →
The Week Observed, March 8, 2024
What City Observatory did this week A yawning chasm in neighborhood distress among metro areas. Almost every metropolitan area has some neighborhoods that face serious economic distress, but the patterns of distress vary ... →
The Week Observed, March 1, 2024
What City Observatory Did this Week Is it time to address the problem of "Missing Massive" housing? This past week marked the latest convening of YIMBYTown, this year, held in Austin, Texas. One of the perennial topic... →
The Week Observed, February 16, 2024
Must Read The freeway cap mirage. Don't like freeways? Let's just cover up the problem. It's increasingly popular to try to repair the damage done to urban neighborhoods by "capping" freeways: building a cover so ... →
The Week Observed, February 9, 2024
What City Observatory did this week Three big flaws in ODOT’s Highway Cost Allocation Study. Some of the most important policy decisions are buried deep in seemingly technocratic documents. Case-in-point: Oregon's... →
The Week Observed, February 2, 2024
Must Read How CalTrans cheated on its environmental reporting. Some months back, former Deputy Director of CalTrans,Jeanie Ward-Waller blew the whistle on the agency's effort to evade environmental laws and illegally us... →
The Week Observed, January 5, 2024
What City Observatory did this week A $9 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement Project? Just 13 months after raising the price of the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) project by more than 50 percent, the Oregon and W... →
The Week Observed, December 22, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Bad data. What appears, at first glance, to be a big decline in trip-making is really an object lesson in failing to read the footnotes. Every five years or so, the US Department of... →
The Week Observed, December 15, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Exaggerated Benefits, Omitted Costs: The Interstate Bridge Boondoggle. A $7.5 billion highway boondoggle doesn’t meet the basic test of cost-effectiveness. The Interstate Bridge... →
The Week Observed, December 8, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Tolling i-5 will produce massive traffic diversion. The proposed I-5 Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) Project will be paid for in part by $2.80 to $4.30 tolls charged to travelers... →
The Week Observed, December 1, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Secret plans show ODOT is planning a 10-lane freeway in the Rose Quarter. City Observatory has obtained previously un-released plans showing that the $1.9 billion I-5 Rose Quarter pro... →
The Week Observed, November 17, 2023
What City Observatory did this week 5 million miles wide of the mark.Portland's regional government Metro, has proposed a regional transportation plan (RTP) that purports to achieve state and regional policies to reduce g... →
The Week Observed, November 10, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Snow-Job: Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) threatens to slash snow-plowing and other safety maintenance unless it is given more money, while spending billions on a handful o... →
The Week Observed, November 3, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Killer off-ramps. The Oregon Department of Transportation's $1.9 billion I-5 Rose Quarter widening has been repeatedly (and falsely) portrayed as a "safety" project, but the latest re... →
The Week Observed, October 27, 2023
What City Observatory did this week More climate fraud in Portland Metro's proposed regional transportation plan. We branded Metro's proposed Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) a climate fraud because in falsely claimed... →
The Week Observed, September 8, 2023
What City Observatory did this week What apartment consolidation in New York tells us about housing markets and gentrification. A new study shows that over the past several decades, New York City lost more than 100,000 ... →
The Week Observed, September 1, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Rose Quarter: Death throes of a bungled boondoggle. For years, we've been following the tortured Oregon Department of Transportation Plans to widen a 1.5 mile stretch of I-5 near do... →
The Week Observed, August 25, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Metro's Climate-Denial Regional Transportation Plan. Portland's regional governtment, Metro, has published a draft Regional Transportation Plan, outlining priorities for transportatio... →
The Week Observed, August 18, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Climate fraud in the Portland Metro RTP. Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan rationalizes spending billions on freeway expansion by publishing false estimates and projections of gr... →
The Week Observed, August 11, 2023
Must Read Some Texas-sized greenwashing for highway widening in Austin. TXDOT is aiming to spend close to $5 billion to widen I-35 through downtown Austin, and to sweeten the deal, they're producing project renderings s... →
The Week Observed, August 4, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Eating local: Why independent, local restaurants are a key indicator of city vitality. Jane Jacobs noted decades ago that“The greatest asset a city can have is something that is d... →
The Week Observed, July 28, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Myth-busting: Idling and greenhouse gas emissions. Highway boosters are fond of claiming that they can help fight climate change by widening highways so that cars don't have to spen... →
The Week Observed, July 21, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Few highway construction dollars for Black-owned firms in Oregon. The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) is falling short of its own goals of contracting with disadvantaged bu... →
The Week Observed, July 14, 2023
What City Observatory did this week We have an in-depth series of reports on the Oregon Department of Transportation's imploding I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project. The cost of the I-5 Rose Quarter project has n... →
The Week Observed, July 7, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Yet another exploding whale: One of the Internet's most popular videos shows employees of the Oregon Department of Transportation blowing up a dead whale carcass stranded on an Ocean ... →
The Week Observed, June 23, 2023
What City Observatory did this week We took the week off to celebrate the Summer Solstice and gorge on Hood strawberries! We'll be back next week. Must Read The amazing non-appearance of Carmageddon. Echoing th... →
The Week Observed, June 16, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Carmageddon does a no-show in Philly. A tanker truck caught fire and the ensuing blaze caused a section of I-95 in Philadelphia to collapse. This key roadway may be out of commissio... →
The Week Observed, June 9, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Guest contributor Miriam Pinski observes that getting the prices right could produce dramatic improvements in how US transportation systems perform. New York is on the verge of implem... →
The Week Observed, June 2, 2023
What City Observatory did this week What computer renderings really show about the Interstate Bridge Replacement Project: It's in trouble. The Interstate Bridge Project has released—after years of delay—computer gra... →
The Week Observed, May 26, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Pricing is a better, cheaper fix for congestion at the I-5 Rose Quarter. The Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to squander $1.45 billion to widen about a mile and a hal... →
The Week Observed, May 19, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Rose Quarter tolls: Available, but not foreseeable? There's a glaring--and illegal--contradiction in the planning for the Oregon Department of Transportation's $1.45 billion Rose Qu... →
The Week Observed, May 12, 2023
What City Observatory did this week There’s plenty of time to fix the Interstate Bridge Project. Contrary to claims made by OregonDOT and WSDOT officials, the federal government allows considerable flexibility in fundin... →
The Week Observed, May 5, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Why can't Oregon DOT tell the truth? Oregon legislators asked the state transportation department a simple question: How wide is the proposed $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacem... →
The Week Observed, April 21, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Why should Oregonians subsidize suburban commuters from another state? Oregon is being asked to pay for half of the cost of widening the I-5 Interstate Bridge. Eighty percent of daily c... →
The Week Observed, April 28, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Testifying on the Oregon Transportation Finance. City Observatory director Joe Cortright testified to the Oregon Legislature on HB 2098, a bill being proposed to fund bloated free... →
The Week Observed, March 3, 2023
What City Observatory did this week More induced travel denial. Highway advocates deny or minimize the science of induced travel. We offer our rebuttal to a reason column posted at Planetizen, attempting to minimize... →
The Week Observed, February 24, 2023
What City Observatory did this week IBR admits its bridge is too steep. After 15 years of telling the region that the only feasible alternative for crossing the Columbia River was a pair of side-by-side double-decker br... →
The Week Observed, February 17, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Driving between Vancouver and Wilsonville at 5PM? ODOT plans to charge you $15. Under ODOT’s toll plans, A driving from Wilsonville to Vancouver will cost you as much as $15, each-w... →
The Week Observed, February 10, 2023
What City Observatory did this week CEVP: Non-existent cost controls for the $7.5 billion IBR project. Oregon DOT has a history of enormous cost overruns, and just told the Oregon and Washington Legislatures that the co... →
The Week Observed, January 20, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Dr. King: Socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. We're reminded this year of Dr. Martin Luther King's observation that our cities, and the public p... →
The Week Observed, January 13, 2023
What City Observatory did this week A reporter's guide to congestion cost studies. For more than a decade, we and others have been taking a close, hard and critical look at congestion cost reports genera... →
The Week Observed, January 6, 2023
What City Observatory did this week The case against the I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening. This week marked the end of public comment on the Supplemental Environmental Assessment for the Oregon Department of Tr... →
The Week Observed, December 16, 2022
Editor's Note: Public Comment on the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Project Between now and January 4, 2023, the public will be asked to weigh in with its comments on the proposed I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Widening project. ... →
The Week Observed, December 2, 2022
Editor's Note: Public Comment on the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Project In the next month, the public will be asked to weigh in with its comments on the proposed I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Widening project. If you're inte... →
The Week Observed, November 4, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Risky bridges: If you're going to spend several billion dollars, you might want to get some independent expert advice. Oregon and Washington are on the verge of committing 5 billion d... →
The Week Observed, October 28, 2022
What City Observatory did this week A toll policy primer for Oregon. The Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to finance billions in future road expansions with tolling. While we're enamored of road pricin... →
The Week Observed, October 21, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Using phony safety claims to sell a billion dollar freeway widening. This past week, Sarah Pliner, a promising young Portland chef was killed when she and her bike were crushed by a t... →
The Week Observed, October 14, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Two of the three candidates for Oregon Governor are Climate Deniers. Oregon will elect a new Governor next month, and two of the three candidates for the job insist on repeating the dis... →
The Week Observed, July 8, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Building a bridge too low--again. In their effort to try to revive the failed Columbia River Crossing (a $5 billion freeway widening project between Portland and Vancouver) the Oregon... →
The Week Observed, May 27, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Our apologies to City Observatory readers for our website outage on 19-22 May. More meaningless congestion pseudo science. A new study from the University of Maryland claims that... →
The Week Observed, March 4, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Oregon crosses the road-pricing Rubicon. Starting this spring, motorists will pay a $2 toll to drive Oregon's historical Columbia River Gorge Highway. Instead of widening t... →
The Week Observed, March 25, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Who's most vulnerable to high gas prices? Rising gas prices are a pain, but they hurt most if you live in a sprawling metro where you have to drive long distances to work, sho... →
The Week Observed, March 18, 2022
Must read The problem with the "reckless driver" narrative. Strong Towns Chuck Marohn eloquently points out the deflection and denial inherent in the emerging "reckless driver" explanation for increasing car crashes and... →
The Week Observed, March 11, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Freeway widening for whomst: Woke-washing the survey data. Highway builders are eager to cloak their road expansion projects in the rhetoric of equity and have become adep... →
The Week Observed, February 25, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Freeway widening for whomst? Woke-washing is all the rage among those pushing highway projects these days, and there's no better example that Portland's I-5 "bridge replacem... →
The Week Observed, January 7, 2022
What City Observatory did this week 1. Metro's failing climate strategy. Portland Metro’s Climate Smart Strategy, adopted in 2014, has been an abject failure. Portland area transportation greenhouse gasses a... →
The Week Observed, January 14, 2022
What City Observatory did this week What does equity mean when we have a caste-based transportation system? Transportation and planning debates around the country increasingly ponder how we rectify long-standin... →
The Week Observed, January 21, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Metro's "Don't look up" climate strategy. In the new film, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play scientists who find that the nation's leaders simply refuse to take s... →
The Week Observed, January 28, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Why Portland shouldn't be moving elementary and middle schools to widen freeways. We're pleased to publish a guest commentary from Adah Crandall, a high school sophomore and... →
The Week Observed, February 4, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Climate and our Groundhog Day Doom Loop. It's Groundhog Day—again—and we're stuck in exactly the same place when it comes to climate policy. Scientists are regularly... →
The Week Observed, February 11, 2022
What City Observatory did this week The "replacement" bridge con. It's telling that perhaps the largest single consulting expense for Oregon and Washington transportation departments' efforts to revive the fai... →
The Week Observed, February 18, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Oregon's highway agency rigs its projections to maximize revenue and downplay its culpability for climate challenge. ODOT has two different standards for forecasting: When it... →
The Week Observed, December 17, 2021
What City Observatory did this week The financial fallout from Louisville's I-65 boondoggle. As we showed earlier, Kentucky and Indiana both wasted a billion dollars on doubling the capacity of I-65 across the... →
The Week Observed, December 10, 2021
What City Observatory did this week 1. ODOT's real climate strategy: Pollution as usual. Oregon's highway builders are keeping two sets of books, one claiming that it cares about climate issues, the other shows that i... →
The Week Observed, December 3, 2021
What City Observatory did this week How Portland powered Oregon's economic success. After decades of lagging the nation, Oregon's income now exceeds the national average. While some seem to think its a mystery: I... →
The Week Observed, November 19, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Why we shouldn't be whining about higher gas prices. Gas prices are going up, and it’s annoying to have to pay more, but let’s take a closer look at how much we’re paying for... →
The Week Observed, November 12, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Has this city discovered how to solve traffic congestion? Why aren't they telling everyone else how this works? A miracle in Louisville. [caption id="attachment_12554" al... →
The Week Observed, November 5, 2021
What City Observatory did this week The Opposite of Planning: Why Portland's Metro government needs to turn down the highway department request for more money to plan future freeway widenings. On paper, and to admirer... →
The Week Observed, October 22, 2021
What City Observatory did this week America's least and most segregated metro areas: Evidence from Census 2020. Racial segregation remains a chronic problem in US metropolitan areas. Data from Census 2020 provides a... →
The Week Observed, October 15, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Ten reasons you can't trust DOT claims that widening highways reduces pollution. Highway departments are fond of ginning up traffic projections and air quality analyses claiming... →
The Week Observed, September 24, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Freeway-widening grifters: Woke-washing, fraud and incompetence. The Oregon Department of Transportation has been trying to sell its $1.25 billion freeway widening project as a ... →
The Week Observed, September 3, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Portland's Clean Energy Fund needs accountability. Portland voters approved a ballot measure creating a $60 million annual fund to invest in community-based clean energy projects, par... →
The Week Observed, August 27, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Is the campus 100 percent clean energy? (Only if you don't count the cars and parking lots). Stanford University announced that its near to realizing a goal to move all of its campu... →
The Week Observed, August 20, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Cost of Living and Auto Insurance. We often compare the affordability of different cities with a clear focus on housing prices and rents. This week at City Observatory we are interest... →
The Week Observed, August 13, 2021
What City Observatory did this week 1. Tackling climate change will require electric cars, and a lot less driving. We're pleased to publish a guest commentary from CalYimby's Matthew Lewis looking at the challenge of ad... →
The Week Observed, August 6, 2021
What City Observatory did this week America's berry best cities. It's the height of the summer fruit season and berries are ripening across the country. Nothing beats a fresh local berry in season. We've ranked the na... →
The Week Observed, July 23, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Selling Oregon into highway bondage. Oregon is moving ahead with plans to issue hundreds of millions—and ultimately billions of dollars of debt to widen Portland-area freeways. An... →
The Week Observed, July 9, 2021
What City Observatory did this week 1. Miami's double standard for charging road users. The City of Miami is hoping to make their streets a safer place for bikes and scooters by building protected lanes along three mile... →
The Week Observed, July 2, 2021
What City Observatory did this week 1. The Texas Transportation Institute is back, and it's still wrong about traffic congestion. Every year or so, a group of researchers at Texas A&M University produce report purpo... →
The Week Observed, June 25, 2021
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cars kill city neighborhoods. Across the nation, America's cities have been remade to accomodate the automobile. Freeways have been widened through city neighborhoods, demolishin... →
The Week Observed, June 18, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Race and economic polarization. In the past several decades, racial segregation in the US has attenuated, but economic segregation has increased. This is nowhere more apparent than... →
The Week Observed, June 4, 2021
What City Observatory this week What ultimately destroyed Tulsa's Greenwood neighborhood: Highways. This past week marked the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre. In 1921, a racist mob attacked and destroyed the B... →
The Week Observed, May 28, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Why highway departments can and should build housing to mitigate road damage. For decades, American cities have been scarred and neighborhoods destroyed by highway construction project... →
The Week Observed, March 26, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. How ODOT destroyed Albina. Urban freeways have been lethal to neighborhoods, especially neighborhoods of color, in cities throughout the nation. While the construction of Interstate ... →
The Week Observed, March 19, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. An open letter to the Oregon Transportation Commission. For more than two years, City Observatory and others have been shining a bright light on the Oregon Department of Transportation... →
The Week Observed, March 12, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. The failure of Vision Zero. Like many regions, the Portland metropolitan area has embraced the idea of Vision Zero; a strategy of planning to take concrete steps over time to reduce th... →
The Week Observed, March 5, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. The fundamental global law of traffic congestion. For years, urbanists have stressed the concept of induced demand, based on the nearly universal observation that widening urban roadwa... →
The Week Observed, January 8, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. 2021 is when we have to get real about tackling climate change. We've boiled our analysis of the climate challenge down to four key points: Pledges alone won't accomplish anything... →
The Week Observed, March 6, 2020
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... →
The Week Observed, March 13, 2020
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... →
The Week Observed, April 3, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. Counting Covid- Cases in US Metro Areas. We've been updating our metro area tabulations of the number of reported Covid-19 cases on a daily basis. You can find our latest tabulations... →
The Week Observed, April 17, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. Regional Patterns of Covid-19 Incidence. The pandemic has struck every corner of the nation, but has clearly hit some areas harder than others. We've focused on those metro areas, like... →
The Week Observed, April 24, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. What the Covid-19 Shutdown teaches us about freeways. Everyone knows that speeds are up on urban roadways around the nation because of the stay-at-home orders to fight the pandemic. But ... →
The Week Observed, June 12, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Covid-19 rates are spiking in five cities. Stay-at-home policies and social distancing have dramatically slowed the spread of the pandemic in the US, but as many state's begin re-op... →
The Week Observed, June 19, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Youth Movement: Our latest CityReport. America's urban revival is being powered by the widespread and accelerating movement of well-educated young adults to the densest, most central... →
The Week Observed, September 25, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Why free parking is one of the most inequitable aspect of our transportation system. There's a lot of well-founded anger over the inequitable aspects of transportation: the burdens... →
The Week Observed, October 2, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Carmaggedon never comes, Portland edition. It's a favored myth that any reduction in road capacity will automatically trigger gridlock, and highway engineers regularly inveigh agains... →
The Week Observed, October 9, 2020
What City Observatory did this week Let's fight congestion with a PR campaign. For decades, when pressed to do something to improve road safety, city and state transportation officials have responded with . . . marketin... →
The Week Observed, October 16, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Covid-19 is now worst in rural areas and red states. Early on in the pandemic, it seemed like everyone attributed the spread of the Coronavirus to big cities and density. It turns ou... →
The Week Observed, December 18, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Want lower rents? Build more housing! A new study from Germany provides more evidence that the fundamentals of economics are alive and well in the housing market. The study looks... →
The Week Observed, December 11, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. The only reason many people drive is because we pay them to. There's an important insight from recent applications of tolling to urban highways. When asked to pay even a modest amoun... →
The Week Observed, November 6, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Achieving equitable transportation: Reallocate road space and price car travel. New York has recorded a kind of "Miracle on 14th Street." By largely banning through car traffic, its ... →
The Week Observed, November 13, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Seven reasons you should be optimistic about cities in a post-pandemic world. There's widespread pessimism about the future of cities. With the pandemic-induced advent of work-at-hom... →
The Week Observed, November 30, 2020
What City Observatory did this week Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Gridlock Tuesday? The day after a nation celebrates its socially distanced "Zoom Thanksgiving" we'll look to see how the pandemic affects the traditional "... →
The Week Observed, October 23, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Now we are six. We marked City Observatory's sixth birthday this week, and took a few moments to reflect back on the journey, and to thank all those who helped us on our way, and to ... →
The Week Observed, October 30, 2020
What City Observatory did this week Equity and Metro's $5 billion transportation bond. This week, Portland residents are voting on a proposed $5 billion payroll tax/bond measure to fund a range of transportation projects.... →
The Week Observed, September 18, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Lived segregation in US cities. Our standard measure of urban segregation, whether people reside in different neighborhoods, doesn't really capture the way people from different raci... →
The Week Observed, September 11, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Manufacturing consent for highway widening. In the early days of freeway battles, state highway departments were power blind and tone-deaf, and citizen activists often triumphed in... →
The Week Observed, September 4, 2020
What City Observatory did this week Why most pedestrian infrastructure is really car infrastructure. One of the most misleading terms you'll hear in transportation is "multi-modal" which in practice means a highway for ca... →
The Week Observed, August 28, 2020
What City Observatory did this week The case against Metro's $5 billion transportation bond. Portland's regional government, Metro, is asking voters to approve a $5 billion package of transportation improvements, to be fu... →
The Week Observed, August 21, 2020
What City Observatory did this week America's most and least segregated cities. Residential racial segregation is a fundamental and persistent aspect of system racism in the United States. Segregation cuts of disfavored g... →
The Week Observed, August 7, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Is it random, or is it Zumper? Are rents going up or down in your city? Listicles showing which places have the biggest jumps (or declines) in rents are a perennial media favorite,... →
The Week Observed, July 31 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. The abject failure of Portland's Climate Action Plan. Last month, Portland issued the final report on its 2015 Climate Action Plan. It emphasizes that the city took action on three-q... →
The Week Observed, July 24 2020
What City Observatory did this week The exodus that never happened. You've probably seen stories bouncing around the media for the past few months claiming that fears that density makes people more susceptible to the pand... →
The Week Observed, July 17, 2020
What City Observatory did this week Dominos falling on Portland's Rose Quarter freeway widening project. In the space of just a few hours two weeks ago, local political support for an $800 million freeway widening project... →
The Week Observed, July 10, 2020
What City Observatory did this week CityBeat: NPR urban flight story. The pack animals of the media have settled on a single, oft-repeated narrative about cities and Covid-19; that fear of the virus will lead people to mo... →
The Week Observed, June 26, 2020
What City Observatory did this week When NIMBYs win, everyone loses. Two land use cases from different sides of the country are in the news this week. In both cases, local opponents of new housing development have succeed... →
The Week Observed, June 5, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Covid-19 and Cities: An uneven pandemic. We've been following the progress of the Covid-19 virus in the nation's metropolitan areas for the past three months, and with the benefit ... →
The Week Observed, May 29, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. LA Covid correlates with overcrowding and poverty, not density. City Observatory is pleased to publish a guest analysis and commentary from Abundant Housing LA's Anthony Dedousis.... →
The Week Observed, May 22, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. Postcards from the Edges: Looking at the relationship between density and the pandemic. There's a widely circulating meme associating urban density with the spread of the Covid-19 viru... →
The Week Observed, May 15, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. City Beat: We push back on a New York Times story claiming that people are decamping New York City on account of pandemic fears. You can always find an anecdote about someone lea... →
The Week Observed, May 1, 2020
What City Observatory this week Our updated analysis of the prevalence of Covid-19 in US metro areas. It continues to be the case that the pandemic is most severe in the Northeast Corridor. The New York Metro area is ... →
The Week Observed, April 10, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. What cities are showing us about the progression of the Covid-19 pandemic. In an important sense, each large US metro area is a separate test case of the path of the Covid-19 virus. By... →
The Week Observed, March 20, 2020
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... →
The Week Observed, March 27, 2020
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... →
The Week Observed, February 28, 2020
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... →
The Week Observed, February 21, 2020
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... →
The Week Observed, February 7, 2020
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... →
The Week Observed, January 31, 2020
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... →
The Week Observed, December 13, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, December 20, 2019
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 ... →
The Week Observed, December 6, 2019
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 ... →
The Week Observed, November 22, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, November 15, 2019
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 ... →
The Week Observed, November 8, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, November 1, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, October 18, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, October 11, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, October 4, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, August 30, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, September 13, 2019
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... →
The High Cost of Segregation
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,... →
The Week Observed, April 7, 2017
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. ... →
The Week Observed, April 14, 2017
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 ... →
The Week Observed, April 21, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, June 9, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, June 23, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, June 30, 2017
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 ... →
The Week Observed, August 11, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, July 28, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, October 13, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, November 10, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, January 26, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, February 9, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, February 16, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, March 9, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, April 6, 2018
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. ... →
The Week Observed, April 13, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, April 20, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, June 15, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, July 13, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, July 27, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, September 14, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, September 21, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, September 28, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, December 7, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, September 6, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, January 11, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, January 18, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, January 25, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, February 1, 2019
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 ... →
The Week Observed, February 8, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, May 3, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, June 14, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, June 7, 2019
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 ... →
The Week Observed, June 21, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, June 28, 2019
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 ... →
The Week Observed, July 5, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, July 12, 2019
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.... →
The Week Observed, July 19, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, August 23, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, August 30, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, August 16, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, August 9, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, August 2, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, July 26, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, May 24, 2019
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. ... →
The Week Observed, May 31, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, May 17, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, May 10, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, April 26, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, April 19, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, April 5, 2019
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 ... →
The Week Observed, April 12, 2019
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 ... →
The Week Observed, February 15, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, March 29, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, March 22, 2019
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 ... →
The Week Observed, March 15, 2019
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 ... →
The Week Observed, March 1, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, March 8, 2019
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 ... →
The Week Observed, February 22, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, December 14, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, December 21, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, November 16, 2018
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.... →
The Week Observed, January 4, 2019
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... →
The Week Observed, November 2, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, November 9, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, November 23, 2018
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.... →
The Week Observed, October 12, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, October 19, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, October 26, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, September 7, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, August 31, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, August 24, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, August 17, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, August 10, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, July 20, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, August 3, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, June 29, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, July 6, 2018
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 ... →
The Week Observed, June 22, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, June 1, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, June 8, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, May 18, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, May 11, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, May 4, 2018
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 ... →
The Week Observed, April 27, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, March 30, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, March 16, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, March 23, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, February 23, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, January 19, 2018
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... →
The Week Observed, December 15, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, December 22, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, January 12, 2018
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 ... →
The Week Observed, January 5, 2018
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 ... →
The Week Observed, December 8, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, December 1, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, November 3, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, November 17, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, October 27, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, October 6, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, October 20, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, September 22, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, September 29, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, September 15, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, September 1, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, September 8, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, August 25, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, July 14, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, July 21, 2017
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 ... →
The Week Observed, July 7, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, August 18, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, June 2, 2017
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 ... →
The Week Observed, June 16, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, May 26, 2017
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 ... →
The Week Observed, May 5, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, March 17, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, March 31, 2017
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 ... →
The Week Observed, March 24, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, March 3, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, March 10, 2017
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 ... →
The Week Observed, February 17, 2017
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 ... →
The Week Observed, February 10, 2017
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 ... →
The Week Observed, February 3, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, February 24, 2017
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 ... →
The Week Observed, May 19, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, January 20, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, January 27, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, January 6, 2017
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. ... →
The Week Observed, January 13, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed, December 23, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed, December 30, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed, December 16, 2016
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 ... →
The Week Observed, December 9, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed, November 25, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed, November 18, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed, November 11, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: November 4, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: October 28, 2016
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 ... →
The Week Observed: October 14, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: October 21, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: October 7, 2016
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 ... →
The Week Observed: September 30, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: September 23, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: Sept. 16, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: Sept. 9, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: Sept. 2, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: Aug. 26, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: Aug. 19, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: Aug. 12, 2016
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 ... →
The Week Observed: Aug. 5, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: July 29, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: July 22, 2016
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 ... →
The Week Observed: July 15, 2016
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: July 8, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: July 1, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: June 24, 2016
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 ... →
The Week Observed, December 2, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: June 17, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: June 10, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: June 3, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: May 27, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: May 20, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: May 13, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: May 6, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: April 29, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: April 22, 2016
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 ... →
The Week Observed: April 15, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: April 8, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: April 1, 2016
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.... →
The Week Observed: March 25, 2016
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 ... →
The Week Observed: March 18, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: March 11, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: March 4, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: February 26, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: February 19, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: February 12, 2016
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 ... →
The Week Observed: February 5, 2016
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, ... →
The Week Observed: January 29, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: January 22, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: January 15, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: January 8, 2016
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... →
The Week Observed: December 24, 2015
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 ... →
The Week Observed: December 18, 2015
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... →
The Week Observed: December 11, 2015
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... →
The Week Observed: December 4, 2015
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... →
The Week Observed: November 27, 2015
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... →
The Week Observed: November 20, 2015
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... →
The Week Observed: November 13, 2015
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 ... →
The Week Observed: November 6, 2015
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... →
The Week Observed: October 30, 2015
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... →
The Week Observed: October 23, 2015
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... →
Happy birthday to us!
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... →
The Week Observed: October 16, 2015
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... →
The Week Observed: October 9, 2015
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... →
The Week Observed: October 2, 2015
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... →
The Week Observed: September 25, 2015
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... →
The Week Observed, April 28, 2017
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... →
The Week Observed: September 18, 2015
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... →
The Week Observed: September 11, 2015
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... →
What do we know about neighborhood change, gentrification, and displacement?
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... →
The Week Observed: September 4, 2015
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 ... →
The Week Observed: August 28, 2015
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... →
The Week Observed, August 21, 2015
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 ... →
The Week Observed: August 14, 2015
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... →
The Week Observed: August 7, 2015
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... →
The Week Observed: July 31, 2015
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... →
The Week Observed: July 24, 2015
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... →
The Week Observed: July 17, 2015
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 ... →
The Week Observed: July 10, 2015
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... →
The Week Observed: July 3, 2015
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... →
The Week Observed: June 26, 2015
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... →