Month: December 2015
-
Our favorites from 2015, part 2
Here are Daniel Kay Hertz’s five favorite posts of 2015: 5. Undercounting the transit constituency When we only look at the number of people who commute on transit, we’re missing others—especially students and the retired—who rely on transit for other reasons. 4. A modest proposal: treat affordable housing more like food stamps Comparing two well-known…
-
Our favorites from 2015, part 1
Over the last two days, we’ve give you readers’ favorite posts from 2015. Now we’re choosing our own. Here are Joe Cortright’s five favorite: 5. Want to close the black/white income gap? Work to reduce segregation The income gap between black and white households is one of the major racial inequalities in American society. It’s also…
-
The Year Observed: Your 12 favorite posts from 2015, part 2
6. Why aren’t we talking about Marietta, Georgia? While stories about displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods abound, more direct, egregious examples of displacement in suburban areas are often left behind. We focused on one particularly galling example of an Atlanta suburb using eminent domain to demolish an apartment complex predominantly occupied by lower-income people of color, to…
-
The Year Observed: Your 12 favorite posts from 2015, part 1
12. Let’s talk about neighborhood stigma In the last year or two, there has been a resurgence of awareness and debate about the big, structural issues facing America’s persistently poor neighborhoods. But one part of the equation has largely been left out: stigma. A large body of research has shown that stigma and reputation, above and…
-
The Week Observed: December 24, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. The Katy isn’t ready for its closeup. When the Texas Department of Transportation tried to sell the public on its Katy Freeway expansion project, part of the story was that it would ease congestion. We covered how that worked out last week. (Not well, is the answer.) Another…
-
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…
-
About that “consensus” on zoning
Is there a “cross-ideological consensus” on zoning reform? Writing in the Washington Post earlier this month, economist Ilya Somin made such a claim. Libertarians, he wrote, have opposed the strict laws that prescribe expensive, exclusionary, low-density homes in most neighborhoods across the country for some time; but now, as noted lefty economist Paul Krugman’s recent…
-
The Katy isn’t ready for its closeup
When it comes to selling huge new road projects to the public, the highway lobby and their allies in government have many tools. Last week, we wrote about one of them: touting initial declines in congestion as success, without bothering to follow up as induced demand eliminates those gains in just a matter of years.…
-
The Week Observed: December 18, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. Don’t bank on it. Hillary Clinton, as part of her campaign for President, has proposed a National Infrastructure Bank to help local governments pay for crucial infrastructure maintenance and upgrades. But it’s not so clear that such a bank is the answer to America’s infrastructure problems. Rather, the…
-
Where did all the small apartment buildings go?
Back in August, we wrote about the phenomenon of the “missing middle”: the fact that today’s urban (and suburban) development tends to take the form of either single-family homes or very large apartment buildings, but not so much in the middle. And that’s a problem! Small apartment buildings perform a vital function in classic “illegal…
-
Reducing congestion: Katy didn’t
Here’s a highway success story, as told by the folks who build highways. Several years ago, the Katy Freeway in Houston was a major traffic bottleneck. It was so bad that in 2004 the American Highway Users Alliance (AHUA) called one of its interchanges the second worst bottleneck in the nation wasting 25 million hours…
-
Homevoters v. the growth machine
There are two big theories about who controls the pace of development in American cities and suburbs. One is the “growth machine.” In this telling, developed by academics like Harvey Molotch in the 1970s, urban elected officials and zoning boards are highly influenced by coalitions of business and civic leaders interested mainly in economic growth…
-
Don’t bank on it
Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton laid out the broad outlines of her plan for a National Infrastructure Bank, which would make low interest loans to help fund all kinds of public and private infrastructure. In an explainer for Vox, Matt Yglesias lays out the case for an infrastructure bank, and sets out some of the…
-
The Week Observed: December 11, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. A $1.6 billion proposal. A film school teacher in San Francisco had some people talking about “ethical landlording” as a solution to the problem of too-high real estate prices. But substituting the private whims of land owners for prices as a way to determine who wins access to…
-
Cities have reason to be wary of Fed moves
Later this month, the Federal Reserve Board (or “the Fed,” as it’s often referred to) will raise interest rates. After seven years of very loose monetary policy designed to facilitate economic recovery from the Great Recession, the Fed now apparently thinks that the economy is healthy enough to stand higher interest rates. Clearly, the financial…
-
Climate concerns steamrolled by FAST Act and cheap gas
There’s plenty of high-minded rhetoric at the UN climate change conference in Paris about getting serious about the threat of climate change. According to the Los Angeles Times, Secretary of State John Kerry is optimistic that, “even without a specific temperature-change limit and legally binding structure, a climate change agreement that negotiators in Paris are…
-
Pulling a FAST one
Whatever remained of the fig leaf claim that the US has a “user pays” system of road finance disappeared completely with the passage of the so-called FAST Act. It would be better to call the new transportation bill the “Free Ride” Act, because that’s exactly what it does: gives auto users something for nothing. It’s…
-
A $1.6 billion proposal
Last week, San Francisco Magazine reported on what, at first glance, just looks like another those-crazy-San-Franciscans-and-their-crazy-housing-market story. It begins with a film school teacher who had bought a home in the Mission neighborhood twenty years ago for just $90,000, recently decided to move, and put her home on the market—sort of. While similar homes in…
-
The Week Observed: December 4, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. Engaged communities, civic participation, and democracy. A guest post from the Knight Foundation’s Carol Coletta begins by noting some dismal numbers on voting in American cities—especially by younger people. But civic engagement can’t just be about once-in-a-while actions; it has to be a daily practice. Carol gives an…
-
You need more than one number to understand housing affordability
Back in October, we wrote a post called “Affordability beyond the median.” While most discussions of housing costs measure based on a city’s or neighborhood’s median price, that’s not all that matters. After all, the median is simply the home for which equal numbers of other homes are more and less expensive. That may be…
-
Is foreign capital destroying our cities?
Be afraid: Big foreign corporations are buying up our cities and stamping out our individuality. Or so warns Saskia Sassen in a piece ominously entitled, “Who owns our cities—and why this urban takeover should concern us all,” published in the Guardian Cities. The harbinger of our doom, according to Sassen: large corporations are buying up…
-
Engaged communities, civic participation, and democracy
Today we’re publishing an edited version of a speech given by Carol Coletta, VP of Community and National Initiatives at the Knight Foundation, last month in Portland, OR. Informed and engaged communities are fundamental to a strong democracy. But many of the signs of those communities are not encouraging: Newspaper readership has plummeted in recent…