How we did the Storefront Index 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... → By Dillon Mahmoudi 23.5.2016
The Storefront Index 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... → By Joe Cortright 26.4.2016
The way we measure housing affordability is broken 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... → By Daniel Hertz 20.7.2015
Misleading Medians & the McMansion Mirage 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 9.3.2015
What does it mean to be a “Smart City?” 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 3.3.2015
What does it mean to be a “Smart City?” 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... → By Joe Cortright 27.4.2017
“Smart Cities” have to be about much more than technology 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. ... → By Joe Cortright 10.9.2019
Jobs Return to City Centers (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... → By Joe Cortright 23.2.2015
Urban Employment: How does your city compare? 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... → By CityObservatory Guest 25.2.2015
Surging City Center Job Growth 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... → By Joe Cortright 23.2.2015
How is economic mobility related to entrepreneurship? (Part 1: Venture Capital) 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 11.2.2015
Best Bar Cities 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... → By CityObservatory Guest 13.2.2015
One tip for a prosperous city economy 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... → By Joe Cortright 27.1.2015
How productive is your city? 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... → By Joe Cortright 29.1.2015
Tracking Neighborhood Change: How we made “Lost In Place” 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... → By Dillon Mahmoudi 20.1.2015
How Should Portland Pay for Streets? 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... → By Joe Cortright 8.1.2015
How Poverty Has Deepened (part 1) 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... → By CityObservatory Guest 12.1.2015
How we build our cities: What’s at stake 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... → By CityObservatory Guest 24.12.2014
Young and Restless 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 19.10.2014
Is your city or neighborhood poorer than 40 years ago? 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... → By CityObservatory Guest 17.12.2014
Gender Differences in Unemployment 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 ... → By CityObservatory Guest 5.12.2014
Are suburbs really happier? 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... → By Joe Cortright 25.11.2014
Why Black Friday Just Isn’t Worth It 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... → By CityObservatory Guest 26.11.2014
Data 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... → By Dillon Mahmoudi 23.2.2015
And the Talent Dividend Prize Winner is . . . 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... → By Joe Cortright 29.10.2014
Young and Restless: How is your city doing? 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 ... → By CityObservatory Guest 20.10.2014
Talent & Prosperity Talent drives city success: The biggest single factor explaining urban economic success is human capital. → By CityObservatory Guest 14.10.2014
Innovation & Entrepreneurship Generating new ideas and creating new businesses drives city economies and national economic growth. → By CityObservatory Guest 14.10.2014
Is Portland really where young people go to retire? 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... → By Joe Cortright 14.10.2014
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How we did the Storefront Index
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... →
The Storefront Index
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... →
The way we measure housing affordability is broken
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... →
Misleading Medians & the McMansion Mirage
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 ... →
What does it mean to be a “Smart City?”
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 ... →
What does it mean to be a “Smart City?”
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... →
“Smart Cities” have to be about much more than technology
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. ... →
Jobs Return to City Centers
(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... →
Urban Employment: How does your city compare?
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... →
Surging City Center Job Growth
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... →
How is economic mobility related to entrepreneurship? (Part 1: Venture Capital)
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 ... →
Best Bar Cities
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... →
One tip for a prosperous city economy
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... →
How productive is your city?
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... →
Tracking Neighborhood Change: How we made “Lost In Place”
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... →
How Should Portland Pay for Streets?
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... →
How Poverty Has Deepened (part 1)
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... →
How we build our cities: What’s at stake
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... →
Young and Restless
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 ... →
Is your city or neighborhood poorer than 40 years ago?
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... →
Gender Differences in Unemployment
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 ... →
Are suburbs really happier?
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... →
Why Black Friday Just Isn’t Worth It
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... →
Data
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... →
And the Talent Dividend Prize Winner is . . .
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... →
Young and Restless: How is your city doing?
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 & Prosperity
Talent drives city success: The biggest single factor explaining urban economic success is human capital. →
Innovation & Entrepreneurship
Generating new ideas and creating new businesses drives city economies and national economic growth. →
Is Portland really where young people go to retire?
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... →