For years, we've been following the tortured Oregon Department of Transportation Plans to widen a 1.5 mile stretch of I-5 near downtown Portland.  The past few months show this project is in serious trouble.  Here's a su... →

Covid-19 now disproportionately affects rural America, and is hitting red states harder than blue ones. Rural counties have 14 percent of US population and 21 percent of new Covid-19 cases. The nation's largest, densest... →

Covid-19 now disproportionately affects rural America, and is hitting red states harder than blue ones. OK, reporters, we're waiting for the stories about rural Americans decamping to cities (or suburbs) and from red st... →

We’ve received many questions on how we did the analysis behind our Storefront Index. This post will describe our dataset, our method, and how we created our visualizations. We hope that this will spur future research an... →

As Jane Jacobs so eloquently described it in The Death and Life of American Cities, much of the essence of urban living is reflected in the “sidewalk ballet” of people going about their daily errands, wandering along t... →

This week, we're running a three-part series on the flawed way that we measure housing affordability. This post looks at exactly what's wrong with one of the most common ways we determine what "affordable" means. Tomorro... →

The last few months have witnessed a notable rebound in vehicle miles traveled. The U.S. Department of Transportation reports that for the year ended December, 2014, American’s drove 3.015 trillion miles, up about 1.7 pe... →

A story published by the Washington Post’s Wonkblog last week made the headline claim that “The McMansion is back, and bigger than ever.”  The article says that new homes are an average of 1,000 feet larger than in ... →

Over the past few weeks, there’s been a fair amount of media furor over the slowdown in container traffic handling on the West Coast as dockworkers and shipping companies negotiated the new terms of a labor deal. You ... →

The growing appreciation of the importance of cities, especially by leaders in business and science, is much appreciated and long overdue.  Many have embraced the Smart City banner.  But it seems each observer defines �... →

This week comes news that Target is laying off 1,700 workers at its Minneapolis headquarters, looking to become leaner and more efficient. It’s just the latest move in a shifting retail landscape in the United States. ... →

The first quarter of 2017 has marked a parade of announced store closures. The long awaited axe has fallen on 68 more Macy's stores around the country. J.C. Penney has announced it will close another 138 stores. Other maj... →

Cities are organisms, not machines; So a smart city has to learn and not be engineered The growing appreciation of the importance of cities, especially by leaders in business and science, is much appreciated and long ov... →

A framework for thinking about smart cities Cities are organisms, not machines The growing appreciation of the importance of cities, especially by leaders in business and science, is much appreciated and long overdue.  ... →

(This post coincides with the newly released report, Surging City Center Job Growth. The report and more details are found here.) For decades, urban economists have chronicled the steady decentralization of employment in... →

As chronicled in our report here and commentary here, we are seeing evidence of a shift in employment back to city centers. We believe that this is driven by a number of forces, including the increasing preference of young... →

For over half a century, American cities were decentralizing, with suburban areas surpassing city centers in both population and job growth. It appears that these economic and demographic tides are now changing. Over the p... →

Lost in Place: Why the persistence and spread of concentrated poverty--not gentrification--is our biggest urban challenge. A close look at population change in our poorest urban neighborhoods over the past four decades sh... →

In a nation increasingly divided by race and economic status, where our life prospects are increasingly de ned by the wealth of our zip codes, some American neighborhoods are bucking the trend. These neighborhoods... →

The work of Raj Chetty and his colleagues at the Equality of Opportunity project has spurred intense interest in the extent of economic mobility, measured by the likelihood that children born to low-income parents achieve ... →

Great public spaces make great cities. But so do great private spaces. They provide opportunities for people to socialize, and provide the character that make a city more livable and unique. We have already talked about ho... →

Local media over the course of the last several months have asked us variations on one question repeatedly: if our city wants to do better – be more productive, retain more young people, reduce poverty—how can it do th... →

Which metropolitan economies are the most productive?  Our broadest measure of economic output is gross domestic product -- the total value of goods and services produced by our economy.  Economists usually compare the p... →

Note: This article appeared originally in the February 13, 2010, edition of The Oregonian. Forgive any anachronistic references. These are tough economic times. Although economists tell us the recession is officially o... →

The red state/blue state divide is a persistent feature of American politics. Political differences among states are also associated with important economic differences, and a similar patterns hold across and within metro ... →

In this post, we'll go over the data and mapping steps that were used to create our Lost In Place report on the concentration of poverty and the interactive web map. This post is one of several commentary posts that accomp... →

For the past several months, Portland’s City Council has been wrestling with various proposals to raise additional funds to pay for maintaining and improving city streets. After considering a range of ideas, including fe... →

Here's a summary of our latest CityReport: Lost in Place: Why the persistence and spread of concentrated poverty--not gentrification--is our biggest urban challenge. Lost in Place traces the history of high poverty neig... →

Many talk about poverty—its causes, its effects, and its possible remedies. There is literature on this issue from almost every social science, and no one can summarize it all in one blog post. However, there’s one asp... →

Guest Commentary by Carol Coletta It’s a glorious moment to be in the business of promoting the built environment. I use “built environment” to encompass the way we build our buildings, arrange our neighborhoods a... →

The Young and Restless—25 to 34 year-olds with a bachelor’s degree or higher level of education—are increasingly moving to the close-in neighborhoods of the nation’s large metropolitan areas.   This migration is ... →

We recently released our latest report, Lost in Place: Why the persistence and spread of concentrated poverty–not gentrification–is our biggest urban challenge. It speaks to a national trend that’s been largely ignor... →

To celebrate the Census Bureau’s release of the 5-year American Community Survey estimate, we decided to do a quick analysis of some of its information. So for some light Friday afternoon reading, we present you with an ... →

Gentrification and neighborhood changes are hotly contested subjects.  In the past few years some very thoughtful and provocative work has been done that helps shed light on these issues.  Here we offer ten more of the m... →

A few months back our friends at CityLab published the results of a survey looking at differences in attitudes about cities and suburbs under the provocative headline, “Overall, Americans in the suburbs are still the hap... →

If you’ve ever contemplated getting up at 3, 4, or 5 am only to brave large crowds to fight over scarce merchandise, well, think again. Instead of looking into census data this Thanksgiving, we thought we’d look at mor... →

If you've hung around enough espresso joints, you've probably heard someone order a “tall, non-fat decaf latte.” This is what baristas often call a "why bother?" That would also be a good alternate description for the ... →

At CityObservatory, we strive to make data the driving force behind our operations. We know that many of you share our keen interest in digging through the data, and we strongly believe that everyone benefits when data sou... →

The big idea: housing in desirable city neighborhoods in getting more expensive because the demand for urban living is growing. The solution? Build more great neighborhoods. To an economist, prices are an important signa... →

Last month, we released our Young and Restless report, tracing the growth of well-educated young adults in in the nation's largest metro areas. We found that across the nation, college-educated 25 to 34 year olds were much... →

The Myth: Traffic congestion is getting worse The Reality: Congestion has declined almost everywhere It’s a common movie trope – a busy commuter rushes out of his downtown office at 5pm, hoping to get only to... →

One of the great ironies of urban economies is the wide disparity between the price of parking and the price of housing in cities. Almost everyone acknowledges that we face a growing and severe problem of housing affordabi... →

Akron, Ohio!  With a 20.2 percent increase in post-secondary degrees awarded over the past three years, Akron outpaced the 56 other metro areas entered in the Talent Dividend Prize contest.  As the winner of the Talent D... →

There is a central and unacknowledged problem in urban transportation: The price is wrong. Underlying traffic congestion, unaffordable housing, and the shortage of great urban places is the key fact that we charge the wron... →

We just released our first CityReport looking at the "Young and Restless," detailing where young talent is going in the U.S.- and why it matters. (Download the report here.) Here we show how the nation's largest cities do ... →

Talent drives city success: The biggest single factor explaining urban economic success is human capital.   →

Density, land use patterns and the transportation system interact to determine how well cities fulfill their fundamental task of bringing people together. →

Young adults are increasingly choosing cities--what will happen when they have kids? →

Forget the quirky, slacker stereotype, the data show people are coming to Portland to start businesses. A recent New York Times magazine article “Keep Portland Broke,” echoed a meme made popular by the satirical... →

It's frequently claimed that traffic congestion imposes high and rising costs on the economy.  But is that true? →