Month: September 2015
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When it comes to transit use, destination density matters more than where you live
At City Observatory, we’ve written quite a bit about the phenomenon of city center job growth. We did a whole CityReport about the phenomenon, showing that since the Great Recession, urban cores have been outperforming the rest of their metropolitan areas on employment, reversing earlier trends. And just this week, we covered new job numbers…
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The high cost of affordable housing and the shortage of cities: notes from a panel
Averting a housing crisis: Panel Discussion from oregonmetro on Vimeo. Last week, City Observatory’s own Joe Cortright took part in a panel hosted by the Portland regional planning agency, Metro, where a standing-room-only crowd heard him, TechCrunch’s Kim-Mai Cutler, Elissa Harrigan of the Meyer Memorial Trust, and developer Eli Spevak talk about whether Oregon’s largest…
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Cities’ role in growing our nation’s economy
Cities have always played a vital role in the national economy, but in the past few years their importance has increased. Last month, we highlighted the “Dow of Cities”—how the rising value of housing in the most central portions of the nation’s metropolitan areas signals the market’s verdict about the growing demand for urban living.…
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The Week Observed: September 25, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. Zoning in everything—even the education gap. By now, thanks to renewed attention in major media outlets from writers like the New York Times‘ Nikole Hannah-Jones, many observers of housing policy debates are aware of the role of exclusionary zoning in promoting residential segregation. We look at a paper…
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The immaculate conception theory of your neighborhood’s origins
Last week, a columnist in Seattle Magazine, Knute Berger, expressed his discontent with modern housing development. As Berger sees it, today’s homebuilding pales in comparison to the virtues of early 20th century bungalow development: In a rapidly growing city where the haves have more and the have-nots are being squeezed out, the bungalows offer a…
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What else does the new “severely rent-burdened” report tell us?
This week, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies and the affordable housing organization Enterprise Community Partners released a report sketching out various scenarios of rental cost and income growth for the next ten years. The headlines are fairly bleak: JCHS and Enterprise project the number of “severely rent-burdened” households to grow under almost any scenario.…
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Why are metropolitan areas more “equal” than their central cities?
To butcher Orwell, all cities are unequal, but some cities are more unequal than others. While working with some of the Census-calculated income inequality numbers—in particular, the Gini index—we noticed an interesting pattern: the central city of a metropolitan area is almost always more unequal than its metropolitan area as a whole. What’s going on?…
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Zoning in everything—even the education gap
A few weeks ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones produced a tour de force report on school segregation in America, which became a two-part episode on the public radio show This American Life. In the first part, she dove into the complex legal and racial geography of the St. Louis metro area, explaining how the imaginary lines of…
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The Week Observed: September 18, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. Great neighborhoods don’t have to be illegal—they’re not elsewhere. Daniel Kay Hertz follows up on our earlier piece about illegal neighborhoodsto point out that most other wealthy countries allow the kinds of mixes of density and uses that most American cities have outlawed. Based on Sonia Hirt’s great…
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What does it mean to be a “smart city”?
In light of Smart Cities Week, we’re updating this post from March about the role of smart technology, people, and successful cities. 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 what does that mean?…
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Is WMATA’s transit cost problem a national issue?
A recent post from the excellent DC blog Greater Greater Washington has made a few ripples among transit advocates. In it, David Alpert takes the growth rate of WMATA’s operating costs (about 6% annually) and its operating revenue (about 1% annually) and makes the straightforward point that this isn’t really sustainable. After all, these…
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The prisoner’s dilemma of local-only planning
One of the most broadly popular ideas about urban planning today is that decisions should be made locally. After all, who knows better what a neighborhood needs than the people who live there? And what better way to squash any would-be Robert Moses than by empowering the people whose homes he would claim for some…
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Great neighborhoods don’t have to be illegal—they’re not elsewhere
Ah, Paris! Perhaps one of the world’s most beautiful cities, a capital of European culture, and prosperous economic hub. What’s its secret? Zoning, of course! Just kidding. Actually, Paris went for the better part of a millennium (until 1967) with nothing that an American might recognize as district-based zoning, a prospect that would surely horrify…
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The Week Observed: September 11, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. My illegal neighborhood. Guest Commentary writer Robert Liberty describes all the things he loves about his neighborhood in Northwest Portland—and then explains why all of them would be illegal to build in a new development today. The mix of apartments and single-family homes doesn’t fit modern ideas about…
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The top ten reasons to ignore TTI’s Urban Mobility Report
Since the Texas Transportation Institute released its 2015 “Urban Mobility Report,” urban transportation experts and advocates have unleashed thousands and thousands of words poking holes at its methodology, assumptions, and political agenda. (We’ve pitched in our fair share of those words, and perhaps more.) As one last entry to this conversation, we wanted to…
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What do we know about neighborhood change, gentrification, and displacement?
In last Friday’s The Week Observed, we flagged an exhaustive literature review from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, summarizing what we know about gentrification and neighborhood change over about 40 pages. We focused on one of the takeaways Richard Florida picked out in his article about the study in CityLab, on the connection…
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My illegal neighborhood
Editor’s note: City Observatory is pleased to provide this guest commentary by our friend Robert Liberty a keen observer of and advocate for cities. by Robert Liberty For many years I lived in Northwest Portland, Oregon. It was a part of the city first settled by white pioneers in the 1860s, but development really…
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The Week Observed: September 4, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. Looking at housing injustice requires a broad lens. A new research project on Bay Area neighborhood change defines “displacement” as any reduction in the number of low-income people in a given community. Daniel Kay Hertz argues that this way of thinking leads us down the wrong path in…
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Who’s really rent-burdened?
Back in July, we published a three–part series about what exactly it means for housing to be affordable. Our basic argument was that the most standard measurement—whether your housing costs are more or less than 30 percent of your income—is inadequate to the task, for several reasons: First, it doesn’t allow for lower-income people to…
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Contradictory conclusions and disappearing data
Part 2: A curious discrepancy between two major congestion reports using the same data Yesterday, we explained why one of the most common takes on the Texas Transportation Institute’s “Urban Mobility Report” is actually totally unjustified: Though many media outlets repeat the UMR’s claim that traffic delays are worse today than it has been since…
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Updated: Is traffic worse now? The “congestion report” can’t tell us
Part 1: Resurrecting discredited data to paint a false history The Texas Transportation Institute claims that traffic congestion is steadily getting worse. But its claims are based on resurrecting and repeating traffic congestion estimates from 1982 through 2009 that were based on a deeply flawed and biased model. Since 2009, TTI has used different data…