Month: May 2015
-
Fake city, flawed thinking
There’s little question that technology is important to cities. Without elevators and electricity, for example, it would be almost inconceivable that we could have dense urban centers. So thinking about how advances in technology are likely to affect city success is critically important. And while technology captures our imagination, sometimes we become so fixated on…
-
New evidence on integration and economic mobility
It’s unusual to flag an economics article as a “must-read” for general audiences: but if you care about cities and place, and about the prospects for the American Dream in the 21st Century, you owe it to yourself to read this new article by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility:…
-
Undercounting the transit constituency
By far the most common way to measure transit use is “commute mode share,” or the percentage of workers who use transit to get to their job. For the most part, this is a measure of convenience: it’s the most direct way the Census asks about transportation, which means it’s the easiest way to get…
-
Baltimore’s problems belong to 2015, not 1968
Think riots destroyed #Baltimore? Entire blocks boarded up. pic.twitter.com/OKSnHXMb9f — Michael Kaplan (@MichaelD_Kaplan) May 1, 2015 Look what the riots did to Baltimore! Oh wait no…These were taken before the riots. Oops. @MayorSRB pic.twitter.com/2iTsnVDf6G — Chels (@BEautifully_C) April 30, 2015 In the wake of violent protests against yet another apparent police killing in Baltimore, variations…
-
There’s no such thing as a Free-Way*
(* with apologies to Donald Shoup) A new report from Tony Dutzik, Gideon Weissman and Phineas Baxandall confirms, in tremendous detail, a very basic fact of transportation finance that’s widely disbelieved or ignored: drivers don’t come close to paying the costs of the roads they use. Published jointly by the Frontier Groups and U. S.…
-
City of ideas, and the idea of cities
Notes from your far flung correspondent, in the shadow of the Acropolis. Though the local economy is still in turmoil, Athens is still awash in the steady tramping of tourists. Compared to your correspondent’s last visit to this city three decades ago, the distinguishing mark of tourism is no longer the long lines of foreigners…
-
How we measure segregation depends on why we care
Last year, NYU’s Furman Center hosted a roundtable of essays on “The Problem of Integration.” Northwestern sociologist Mary Pattillo kicked it off: I must begin by stating that I am by no means against integration…. My comments are not to promote racial separatism, nor to argue that people of the same “race”–-and we must always signal…
-
Gentrification: The state of the debate in 2015
Gentrification continues to command an enormous amount of attention in the media, and several prominent publications – from The Economist to The Week – have made provocative arguments on the subject since our previous roundups in December. Here’s our take on what’s being said. We worry too much about gentrification 1. “Bring on the Hipsters,”…