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... →

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... →

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 ... →

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... →

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... →

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... →

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 ... →

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... →

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... →

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... →

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... →