Month: February 2016
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Cities can’t solve all our problems
As our name implies, we’re very focused on cities. We think cities are the key to solving many of the nation’s most challenging problems, from economic opportunity and social justice, to environmental sustainability. And we’re not alone: more and more, activists are looking to cities to take the lead on critical policy issues. Cities should…
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The Week Observed: February 26, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Another round on the Washington Post‘s housing roundtable. On Friday, we took part in a roundtable at the Washington Post‘s Wonkblog on what it would take to solve the housing affordability crises in places like San Francisco. On Monday, we followed up on some of the ideas of…
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Designed to fail
A breathless feature article at the New York Times describes how the design wizards at IDEO are helping stodgy old Ford Motor Company re-imagine how transportation might work in the future. IDEO conceptualized the design task by sending groups of its employees to a restaurant a few miles away via different transportation modes, so…
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What I learned playing SimCity
Like most city lovers of a certain age, I spent many hours as a kid playing SimCity. For readers who are tragically uninitiated, SimCity is one of the iconic computer games of the 1990s, though new versions have been released as recently as 2013. Playing as mayor (or, really, dictator, but more on that later),…
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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…
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Another round on the Washington Post’s housing roundtable
Last Friday, we took part in a roundtable at the Washington Post’s Wonkblog on affordable housing. The conversation focused on a long-running debate about how best to address the affordability crisis in cities like San Francisco, and was sparked in particular by the new California Legislative Analyst’s Office report that found neighborhoods in the Bay…
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The Week Observed: February 19, 2016
Next week, we’ll be releasing our latest City Report, which maps the location of consumer-facing businesses around the nation to provide a new, quantitative measure of a city’s street-level vitality—one facet of Jane Jacobs’ famed “sidewalk ballet.” Look for the full report, as well as detailed maps and breakdowns for each of the 51 largest…
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Costly misses on convention centers
Today’s guest post comes from our colleague Heywood Sanders, Professor at the University of Texas San Antonio, and author of Convention Center Follies. Lots of people make guesses about the future. So do cities. And cities often employ “expert” consultants, who presumably have a wealth of knowledge and expertise to inform their guesses, and provide…
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Urban myth busting: New rental housing and median-income households
After fourteen seasons, Discovery Channel’s always entertaining “Mythbusters” series is coming to an end later this year. If you haven’t seen the show, co-hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman construct elaborate (often explosive) experiments to test whether something you see on television or in the movies could actually happen in real life. (Sadly, you can’t…
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With highway expansion, be careful what you wish for
I live in Chicago. In Chicago, like pretty much everywhere, people complain about traffic. Almost every day, our roads and highways get congested at rush hour, leaving people crawling along supposedly high-speed corridors, wasting time, money, and gas. This is what it looks like on a typical Monday at 5:35 pm: Obviously, no one is…
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More driving means more dying
New data from the national traffic safety administration shows an ominous trend: traffic related deaths are up 11.3 percent for the first nine months of 2015, as compared to the same period a year earlier. Although the NHTSA warns that the data are subject to revision, and cautions that it’s too early to discern the…
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The Week Observed: February 12, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. More evidence on the “Dow of cities.” We’ve argued before that evidence of shifting demand for urban real estate can be read as a sort of “stock” in cities—and that cities’ stock has been rising. A new report from Zillow underscores this trend. It finds that for the first…
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Inclusionary zoning has a scale problem
Over the last few months, we’ve outlined a number of policy ideas that address the problem of housing affordability by dramatically expanding the number of people receiving some sort of housing assistance. (Low-income people, that is. We think the number of affluent people receiving housing assistance is already pretty high.) We suggested taxing the growth…
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Report: Market-rate housing construction is a weapon against displacement
We’ve known for a long time that housing shortages are a major driver of high housing prices—and that, as a result, places that prevent new construction also tend to have big affordability problems. But now, for the first time that we’re aware of, researchers have taken the next step to showing directly that places like…
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Why the first-time homebuyer is an endangered species
First-time home buyers play a critical role in the housing market. The influx of new households into the owner-occupied market is a key source of sales, and provides impetus for existing homeowners to move, liquidate their investment, or trade up to a bigger or better house. They’re the bottom of the home-buying pyramid. The number…
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More evidence on the “Dow of cities”
Last year, we described the widening gap between typical housing values in cities and suburbs as the “Dow of cities”: Just as differences in stock prices signal the performance of companies, variations in average home prices are a market signal of the performance of cities. High and rising prices, relative to the overall market, are…
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The Week Observed: February 5, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Don’t demonize driving—just stop subsidizing it. City Observatory likes to make data-driven arguments—but the rhetorical frameworks we use to explain the data matter, too. Here, we take a minute to try to reframe the urbanist argument about the role of cars in a “good” city. While advocates’ rhetoric…
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More support for a real estate capital gains tax
A few months ago, we offered a proposal to dramatically increase funding for affordable housing and put a damper on real estate speculation: tax housing capital gains. While San Francisco’s voter-approved Proposition A will produce a one-time infusion of $310 million for below-market housing, and that city’s inclusionary zoning ordinance has produced just about $30…
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Bursting Portland’s urban growth boundary won’t make housing more affordable
Like many cities in the US, Portland has been experiencing an affordable housing crisis as rents have risen substantially over the last several years. One proposed solution to this problem is inclusionary zoning—requiring people who build new apartments to hold some units’ rent at below-market rates. In the coming month or so, the Oregon Legislature…
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Who’s afraid of affordable housing?
Update: As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, the SF Board of Supervisors has passed the ordinance in question. As bitter as the housing debate in the San Francisco Bay Area gets sometimes, no one disagrees that the region is facing a crisis of high costs. It’s just that some people believe the crisis can’t be resolved…
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Don’t demonize driving—just stop subsidizing it
At City Observatory, we try to stick to a wonky, data-driven approach to all things urban. But numbers don’t mean much without a framework to explain them, and so today we want to quickly talk about one of those rhetorical frameworks: specifically, how we talk about driving. Our wonky perspective tells us that there are…