Month: September 2016
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The Week Observed: September 30, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Where are African-American entrepreneurs? A new Census Bureau survey, undertaken in cooperation with the Kauffman Foundation provides a detailed demographic profile of the owners of the nation’s businesses. It reports that there are about 108,000 African-American owned businesses with paid employees (i.e., not counting self-employed entrepreneurs). We look…
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The price of autonomous cars: why it matters
If you believe the soothsayers–including the CEO of Lyft–our cities will soon be home to swarms of autonomous vehicles that ferry us quietly, cleanly and safely to all of our urban destinations. The technology is developing–and rolling out–at a breakneck pace. Imagine some combination of Uber, electrically powered cars, and robotic control. You’ll use your…
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How much will autonomous vehicles cost?
Everyone’s trying hard to imagine what a future full of autonomous cars might look like. Sure, there are big questions about whether a technology company or a conventional car company will succeed, whether the critical factor will be manufacturing prowess or software sophistication, and all manner of other technical details. But for economists —…
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Counting People and Cars: Placemeter
We confess: we’re data geeks. We love data that shows how cities work, and that give depth and precision to our understanding of policy problems. But truth be told, most data we — and other analysts — work with is second-hand: its data that somebody else gathered, usually for some other purpose, that uses definitions…
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Where are African-American entrepreneurs?
Entrepreneurship is both a key driver of economic activity and an essential path to economic opportunity for millions of Americans. Historically, discrimination and lower levels of wealth and income have been barriers to entrepreneurship by African-Americans, but that’s begun to change. According to newly released data from the Census Bureau, its now estimated that there…
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The Week Observed: September 23, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. America’s most creative metros, ranked by Kickstarter campaigns. One of the most popular ways to raise funds for a new creative project–music, a video, an artistic endeavor, or even a clever new product–is Kickstarter. Website Polygraph.cool has created an impressive visualization of nearly 100,000 kickstarter campaigns. We use…
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Lessons in Supply and Demand: Housing Market Edition
Its apparent to almost everyone that the US has a growing housing affordability problem. And its generating more public attention and public policy discussions. Recent proposals to address housing affordability in California by Governor Jerry Brown and in New York, by Mayor Bill de Blasio have stumbled in the face of local opposition. Its…
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Caught in the prisoner’s dilemma of local-only planning
The fundamental conundrum underlying many of our key urban problems is the conflict between broadly shared regional interests and impacts in local communities. While we generally all share an interest in housing affordability, and therefore it makes sense that we ought to support an expansion of housing supply in our region, it becomes a different…
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Successful cities and the civic commons
At City Observatory, we’ve been bullish on cities. There’s a strong economic case to be made that successful cities play an essential role in driving national economic prosperity. As we increasingly become a knowledge-driven economy, it turns out that cities are very good at creating the new ideas of all kinds that propel economic…
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Kickstarting your local creative economy
One of the cleverest adaptations of web-technology is the development of crowd-sourced funding for new products and business ideas. The biggest of these crowd-sourced funding platforms is Kickstarter, which since its launch in 2009, has generated funding for ideas like the pebble smartwatch, the “coolest” cooler and a revival of the Mystery Science Theater 3000…
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The Week Observed: Sept. 16, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities are powering the rebound in national income growth. There was great news in this week’s Census report: After years of stagnation, average household income saw its largest one-year gain on record (5.2 percent). But underlying that story was another one: household incomes in central cities surged even faster…
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Cities are powering the rebound in national income growth
Behind the big headlines about an national income rebound: thriving city economies are the driver. As economic headlines go, it was pretty dramatic and upbeat news: The US recorded an 5.2 percent increase in real household incomes, not only the first increase since 2007, but also the biggest one-year increase ever recorded. Its a signal…
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Parking meters and opportunity costs
What if we could make parking spaces in high-demand areas more widely available, while also making better use of under-used parking spaces elsewhere? Think of it as Uber’s “surge pricing,” but for parking. (Though it elicits some grumbles from a consumer perspective, we think surge pricing can make lots of sense: it encourages more efficient…
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Portland considers inclusionary zoning
What should cities do to tackle growing housing affordability problems? Is inclusionary zoning a good way to provide more affordable housing, or will it actually worsen the constrained housing supply that’s a big cause of higher rents? In the next few months, the city of Portland, Oregon will be considering the terms of a new…
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McMansions Fading Away?
Just a few months ago we were being told—erroneously, in our view–that the McMansion was making a big comeback. Then, last week, there were a wave of stories lamenting the declining value of McMansions. Bloomberg published: “McMansions define ugly in a new way: They’re a bad investment –Shoddy construction, ostentatious design—and low resale values.” The…
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The Week Observed: Sept. 9, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Counting Women Entrepreneurs. The Census Bureau has just released the results of its new survey of entrepreneurs, and we report its key findings on the extent and geography of women-owned businesses. There are more than 1.1 million women-owned businesses with more than 5 million employees; about one in…
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For low-income households, median home prices aren’t always what count
Affordable housing is an issue rife with statistics: median rents, median housing costs, percentage of people who are “housing cost burdened,” and so on. Previously, we’ve written about some of the issues with many of these statistics, including the untrustworthiness of most “median rent” reports and which rent statistics are more trustworthy. But another issue—which…
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Back to school: Three charts that make the case for cities
Its early September, and most of the the nation’s students are (or shortly will be) back in the classroom. There may be a few key academic insights that are no longer top of mind due to the distractions of summer, so as good teachers know, now is a good time for a quick refresher–something that…
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Counting women entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurship is both a key driver of economic activity and an essential path to economic opportunity for millions of Americans. For much of our history, entrepreneurship has been dominated by men. But in recent decades, women have overcome many of the social and other obstacles entrepreneurship and as a result, the number of women active…
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The Week Observed: Sept. 2, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Which cities and metros shop most at small retail firms? A new “big data” set from the JPMorganChase Institute offers some answers. It uses 16 billion transactions from the bank’s customers in 15 metro areas to estimate the share of retail spending that goes to businesses of different sizes…
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Transatlantic advice on city development strategies
We’ve all been paying a lot more attention to developments in Britain since June’s Brexit vote. As we noted at the time, some of the same kinds of political divides that play out in America—between globally-integrated, knowledge driven cities and more rural areas that are older, less-educated—also happen in Britain. (Population density helps explain the…