Month: July 2016
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The Week Observed: July 29, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Economist Paul Romer Joins the World Bank. Paul Romer, a leading exponent of the New Growth Theory has been hired as chief economist for the World Bank. We explore how his thinking about the role of knowledge-driven growth and the key role of cities in fostering institutional and…
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The triumph of the City and the twilight of nerdistans
This is a story about the triumph of the City—not “the city” that Ed Glaeser has written about in sweeping global and historic terms—but the triumph of a particular city: San Francisco. For decades, the San Francisco Bay Area’s economy has been a microcosm and a hot house for studying the interplay between innovation, economic…
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How gentrification affects small businesses
When we talk about gentrification, we often focus on housing. But another major concern is the effects of rising prices on retail—both because of what it means about the accessibility of goods and services for local residents, and because of questions of “community character.” The Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank’s recent symposium on gentrification included a…
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The party platforms on housing
Urban policy conversations are largely focused on local policy, though we at City Observatory have occasionally argued that more attention ought to be paid to state and federal policy. We haven’t had much to say about the presidential candidates themselves this year, but one exercise that’s worth paying a bit of attention to is the…
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Housing Cost Calculators
Suddenly, we’re awash in calculators. Housing calculators. If you’re a Baby Boomer, you remember the day you saw your first electronic calculator. It had an electronic display–red or green light-emitting diode segments, usually eight or ten of them that would display numbers, arithmetic operators and a decimal point. They had a few hard-to-press chicklet type…
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Paul Romer to the World Bank
Today we’re getting really wonky. Paul Romer, who’s currently at New York University’s Marron Institute has just been appointed to be the chief economist for the World Bank. Personnel decisions involving technocratic positions at global NGOs is about as wonky as it gets, of course. But this is a genuinely interesting development, especially if you’re…
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The Week Observed: July 22, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Homeownership: A failed wealth creation strategy. Its an article of faith that owning a home is the most reliable route to wealth building in the US. But this hasn’t been true over the past decade, and its especially problematic for low income households and minorities. The housing market…
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A change
Last April, I wrote my first ever post for City Observatory, which unfortunately began with a David Foster Wallace quote. But it was up and up from there. Over the last year-plus here, City Observatory has given me an incredible platform to explore urban issues in public, combining intellectual rigor with a variety of subject…
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Housing can’t be a good investment and affordable
Recently, we made the case that promoting homeownership as an investment strategy is a risky proposition. No financial advisor would recommend going into debt in order to put such a massive part of your savings in any other single financial instrument—and one that, as we learned just a few years ago, carries a great deal…
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Homeownership can exacerbate inequality
In yesterday’s post, we described why homeownership is such a risky financial proposition for low income households, who tend to be disproportionately people of color. From a wealth-building standpoint, lower income households tend to buy homes at the wrong time, in the wrong place, face higher financing costs, and have less financial resilience to withstand the…
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Homeownership: A failed wealth-creation strategy
It’s an article of faith in some quarters—well, most quarters—that in the United States, owning a home ought to be a surefire way to build wealth. Whether it’s presidents, anti-poverty groups, foundations, or realtors, we’re always being told that that homeownership is the foundation of the American dream, and a key way secure one’s financial…
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The Week Observed: July 15, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. How safe will the autonomous cars of the future be? The first-ever fatal collision involving a Tesla running on autopilot mode has prompted a debate on that subject. On the one hand, hand-wringing over an uncertain threat may seem somewhat out of place given the normalization of the…
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Lessons of Westchester
Westchester County, the mostly wealthy suburbs just north of New York City, is at the epicenter of one of the nation’s leading court battles over housing segregation. Last week, the New York Times reported that seven years since the Justice Department accused many of the county’s municipalities of using exclusionary zoning laws and other policies to…
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Rules of the road
Earlier, we wrote about the first fatal crash of a partly-self-driving car. A Tesla, operating on autopilot mode, failed to detect a semi-trailer crossing in its path, and the resulting collision killed its human driver. The crash has provoked a great deal of discussion in the media about safety data, the potential for future technology,…
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The values of value capture
Late last month, the Illinois General Assembly passed legislation allowing what may become one of the largest transit value capture measures in the US. “Value capture” is a transit funding mechanism based on the idea that public transit creates broad social benefits—from more housing demand to swifter commerce in newly accessible shopping districts—and ought to…
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Less than perfect
Last week, sadly, two tragic deaths represented unfortunate, but predictable firsts in transportation. They are also reminders that despite the very real potential benefits of new technology, operating large metal objects at high speeds is an inherently dangerous activity, and public safety is best served by reducing people’s exposure to the risk—which means designing urban…
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The Week Observed: July 8, 2016
The Week Observed recently celebrated its first birthday! At the end of June 2015, we sent our first roundup of the most important urbanist news to about 700 people; since then, we’ve faithfully published a new issue every Friday, and we’re proud that today’s message will reach over 1,600 subscribers in every part of the…
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Londonize!
One of the first “urbanist” blogs I found was Copenhagenize. It’s a brilliantly simple name that carries its argument in a single word: Here is a place, Copenhagen, that does something right, so let’s be more like them. The thing Copenhagenize has in mind is biking. From particular styles of bike lanes, to more general…
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Review: State of the Nation’s Housing 2016
At City Observatory, we love fat reports full of data, especially when they shed light on important urban policy issues. Last week, we got the latest installment in a long-running series of annual reports on housing produced by Harvard’s Joint Center on Housing Studies (JCHS). The State of the Nation’s Housing, 2016—aka SONH2016—presents copious details…
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The fourth virtue of public transit
For most Americans, public transit basically has three virtues. The first two cater to liberal sensibilities: it’s environmentally friendly, and because it’s cheap, it’s effectively a sort of transportation safety net for the poor. On top of those feel-good benefits, there’s a “business” case, which is that public transit is good for economic development. These…
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The Week Observed: July 1, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Last week’s big news was Brexit: the vote by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. What does that have to do with urban policy on our side of the Atlantic? Well, it turns out that just as urban density predicts voting behavior in America, with denser…