Month: August 2015
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Looking at housing injustice requires a broad lens
What does it mean for someone to be displaced by gentrification? And in a just world, what do our cities’ neighborhoods look like? As reported by Next City, a team of researchers at the University of California-Berkeley has put together a an analysis that probes just those questions. But the stilted answers they come up…
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The Week Observed: August 28, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. Another tall tale from the Texas Transportation Institute. This week, TTI released another episode of its “Urban Mobility Report,” claiming to measure the cost of congestion and track the continued worsening of traffic in American cities. The problem, as Joe Cortright explains, is that these reports are riddled…
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New Orleans’ missing black middle class
Washed away? Or moved to the suburbs? At FiveThirtyEight, Ben Casselman writes: “Katrina Washed Away New Orleans’s Black Middle Class.” It’s a provocative piece showing the sharp decline in the black population of the city of New Orleans, particularly the city’s black middle class. While the city has rebounded in many ways since Katrina, the…
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UPDATED (again): Another tall tale from the Texas Transportation Institute
UPDATE: A chorus of congestion cost critiques By this point, researchers and practitioners from around the country (and beyond!) have laid out their problems with TTI’s congestion reports. Here’s a roundup of some of the best: Todd Litman of the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute comprehensively debunks the TTI methodology: “The UMR ignores basic research principles:…
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Growing e-commerce means less urban traffic
The takeaway: Urban truck traffic is flat to declining, even as Internet commerce has exploded. More e-commerce will result in greater efficiency and less urban traffic as delivery density increases We likely are overbuilt for freight infrastructure in an e-commerce era Time-series data on urban freight movements suffer from series breaks that make long term…
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Are racial “tipping points” overblown?
Why are America’s neighborhoods so segregated? For a lot of people, the answer requires reaching deep into history: explaining the rise of the subsidized mortgage market and redlining; racial violence in towns from Cicero, Illinois to Charleston, South Carolina; restrictive racial covenants; blockbusting; and on and on. But back in 1971, a professor named Thomas…
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The Week Observed, August 21, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. The suburbs: where the rich ride transit. In many cities, transit ridership is dominated by a transit dependent population: people who can afford to own private cars don’t use the transit system. But in some places transit is a mode of choice for higher income commuters. Daniel Kay…
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The Dow of Cities
OK, we admit it. We’re data geeks. To us, sometimes — well, often — a single number or data set is compelling proof of an important proposition: bare-naked, and with no verbal embellishment or deeply personal anecdote or cutesy infographic. Here’s the simple number: since 2000, home prices in city centers have outperformed those in…
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The war of words: rhetoric and the city
Over at Belt Magazine, editor Anne Trubek is fed up with the overuse of planning cliches in writing about cities. She’s asking, nay demanding, that everyone stop using ten words: walkability liveability placemaking civic engagement sustainability smart growth mixed-use accessibility adaptive reuse gentrification She’s put her finger on something. These words are used, and over-used…
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The edifice complex and our infrastructure problems
As Robert Caro chronicled in his riveting biography “The Power Broker,” the great builder Robert Moses had a foolproof strategy for getting new highways approved. He’d take a little bit of money and get the project started, driving stakes in the ground and manufacturing expectations about future development opportunities. Then he’d dare the Legislature not…
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The suburbs: where the rich ride transit
This isn’t actually a post about transit. It’s about land use. But we’ll get there in a second. Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, is responsible for one of the most widely-shared quotes in the urbanist world: “An advanced city,” he said, “is not one where the poor use cars, but rather one…
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The suburbs: where the rich ride transit
This isn’t actually a post about transit. It’s about land use. But we’ll get there in a second. Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, is responsible for one of the most widely-shared quotes in the urbanist world: “An advanced city,” he said, “is not one where the poor use cars, but rather one…
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The Week Observed: August 14, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. City home prices outpacing suburbs by 50 percent. Joe Cortright examines a new study prepared by investment firm Fitch looking at the growing value premium in central cities. Since 2000, home prices have grown 50 percent faster in urban centers than in their surrounding metro areas. For hard…
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City home prices outpacing metro by 50%
Since 2000, home prices have grown 50 percent faster in urban centers than in their surrounding metro areas. If your are an urban data geek, like we are, this is big news. A dramatic shift in city-suburb price differentials strongly signals a deep and enduring market demand for cities. A new research report from investment…
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Between highrises and single-family homes
One of the most controversial recommendations from Seattle’s affordable housing task force, or HALA, was to reform zoning laws that only allow single-family homes in certain neighborhoods. That was always going to be a challenge—as Sonia Hirt argues in her history of American zoning, Zoned in the USA, prioritizing and protecting single-family-home-only neighborhoods…
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The next road safety revolution
“The automobile tragedy is one of the most serious…man-made assaults on the human body,” wrote Ralph Nader in 1965. “It is a lag of almost paralytic proportions that these values of safety…have not found their way into legislative policy-making for safer automobiles.” Those words come from the preface of Unsafe at Any Speed, an expose…
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The Week Observed: August 7, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. Let’s talk about neighborhood stigma. Daniel Kay Hertz reviews some of the literature on the interplay between a neighborhood’s reputation and its disadvantage—and finds a surprising reversal in the conventional understanding of the issue. Rather than problems like greater crime or vandalism leading to bad reputations, researchers like…
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The McMansion mirage reappears
OK, we admit we might be a bit obsessed with this story. But if you can, bear with us one more time. Here’s the most basic fact: The number of newly-built McMansions—single family homes of 4,000 square feet or larger—is down 43 percent since 2007. By any standard that’s a stunning decline. But because the market…
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Revisiting Marietta
Last month, we questioned why people weren’t paying more attention to Marietta, the Atlanta suburb that is tearing down 1,300 apartments and permanently displacing their low-income residents. We wondered why this large-scale displacement of poor households—most of whom are black or Latino—didn’t generate the same kind of outcry as much more ambiguous situations in urban…
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Urban buses are slowing down
Back in June, we catalogued how riders weren’t really abandoning buses—buses were abandoning their riders, with significant cuts to service in many metropolitan areas that appeared to be driving declines in ridership. Further analysis of transit data since 2000 suggests that bus riders may have another problem: not only are there fewer buses on their…
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Let’s talk about neighborhood stigma
My hometown, Chicago, is having a fight over words: in particular, “Chiraq.” That’s a portmanteau of “Chicago” and “Iraq,” which is meant to analogize the city not to that country’s rich cultural heritage, or extreme weather, but to its war. The name seems to have come from a South Side rapper, but has since been…