Month: June 2015
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Climate concerns crush Oregon highway funding bill
While headlines focus on the nearly-bankrupt federal Highway Trust Fund, state and local departments of transportation across the country are facing declining revenues, maintenance backlogs, and an insatiable desire for funding new projects. As a result, this summer, a number of states are working on new highway funding packages. So far in 2015, eight states…
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Three more takeaways from Harvard’s “State of the Nation’s Housing” report
“The State of the Nation’s Housing 2015,” the report published last week by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, has already garnered a lot of attention. We wrote about how it points to a new “gerontrification” of homeownership, with all the growth in non-renter households predicted to come from the 65+ age range; Emily Badger focused…
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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 cities. Our goal is to help you keep up with—and participate in—the ongoing debate about how to create prosperous, equitable, and livable cities,…
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The new trend in homeownership: Gerontrification
Two major reports in the last week have painted a stark picture of the future of the US housing market. Last week’s report from the Urban Institute predicted that the decline in homeownership over the past seven years will be “the new normal.” Then, on June 24, Harvard’s Joint Center on Housing Studies released its…
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Portland, the Mission, and the housing affordability debate
It would be tempting to call the eight hours of testimony over a proposed moratorium on housing construction in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood, and the SF Board of Supervisor’s subsequent failure to approve that moratorium earlier this month, a climactic moment in the battle of two very different perspectives about affordable housing. Tempting, but almost certainly…
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Playing together is getting harder to do
In our CityReport, Less in Common, we explored a key symptom of the decline in social capital: Americans seem to be spending less time playing together. One major driver of this trend is a dramatic privatization of leisure space. Instead of getting together in public parks and pools (or just playing in the street),…
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The Civic Commons & City Success
Why we wrote “Less in Common,” our latest CityReport. We’ve come increasingly to understand the role of social capital in the effective function of cities and urban economies. The success of both local and national economies hinges not just on machines and equipment, skilled workers, a financial system and the rule of law, but also…
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Less in Common
The essence of cities is bringing people—from all walks of life—together in one place. Social interaction and a robust mixing of people from different backgrounds, of different ages, with different incomes and interests is part of the secret sauce that enables progress and creates opportunity. This ease of exchange underpins important aspects of our personal…
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Is gentrification a rare big city malady?
Gentrification is a big issue in a few places, and not an issue at all elsewhere. Big cities with expensive housing are the flashpoint for gentrification. The city-policy-sphere is rife with debate on gentrification. Just in the past weeks, we have a French sociologist’s indictment of bourgeois movement to the central city, the Mayor of…
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The Convention Center Business Turns Ugly
There’s probably no better example of the faddish, “me too” approach to urban economic development than the pursuit by cities of every size for a slice of the convention and trade show business. Cities have built and expanded convention centers for decades, and in the past few years it’s become increasingly popular to publicly subsidize…
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Show Your Work: Getting DOT Traffic Forecasts Out of the Black Box
Traffic projections used to justify highway expansions are often wildly wrong The recent Wisconsin court case doesn’t substitute better models, but it does require DOTs to show their data and assumptions instead of hiding them The road less traveled: Wisconsin Highway 23 There’s a lot of high-fiving in the progressive transportation community about last month’s…
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The real welfare Cadillacs have 18 wheels
Truck freight movement gets a subsidy of between $57 and $128 billion annually in the form of uncompensated social costs, over and above what trucks pay in taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If trucking companies paid the full costs associated with moving truck freight, we’d have less road damage and congestion, fewer crashes,…
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Urban residents aren’t abandoning buses; buses are abandoning them
“Pity the poor city bus,” writes Jacob Anbinder in an interesting essay at The Century Foundation’s website. Anbinder brings some of his own data to a finding that’s been bouncing around the web for a while: that even as American subways and light rail systems experience a renaissance across the country, bus ridership has been…