Month: October 2016
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The myth of revealed preference for suburbs
If so many people live in suburbs, it must be because that’s what they prefer, right? But the evidence is to the contrary. One of the chief arguments in favor of the suburbs is simply that that is where millions and millions of people actually live. If so many Americans live in suburbs, this must…
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The Week Observed: October 28, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1.Measuring Walkability: Non-car modes of transportation have always been at a disadvantage in policy discussions because of a profound lack of widely available quantitative measures of walkability, and because all of the metrics developed to guide transportation focused on moving cars. That’s begun to change with the advent of…
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Lies, damn lies, and (on-line shopping) statistics.
Here’s an eye-catching statistic: “people in the US buying more things online than in brick-and-mortar stores.” This appears in the lead of a story published this week by Next City. There’s one problem with this claim: it’s not remotely close to true. One of the things we pay taxes for is the Census Bureau, which…
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Reversed Polarity: Bay Area venture capital trends
The greater San Francisco Bay area has been a hotbed of economic activity and technological change for decades, bringing us ground-breaking tech companies from Hewlett-Packard and Intel, to Apple and Google, to AirBNB and Uber. Its a great place to spot trends that are likely to spread elsewhere. One such trend is the growing tendency…
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Our infographic for thinking about the civic commons
City Observatory is about cities, and while much of the discussion of urban policy surrounds the physical and built environment, ultimately cities are about people. When cities work well, they bring people together. Conversely, when cities experience problems, its often because we’re separated from one another or driven apart. A critical feature of cities…
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Walk on by: How not to improve walkability measures.
Last week, we noticed a small item on Streetsblog: “Where Walk Score falls short.” Because we’re keenly interested in to walkability, and routinely use Walk Score to benchmark walkable places, we clicked the link. It took us to a blog entry from Mariela Alfonzo asking “Does walk score walk the walk?” Dr. Alfonzo has been…
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The Week Observed: October 21, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities for Everyone: Our Birthday Wish. October 15 marked City Observatory’s second birthday. We reviewed some of the highlights of the past year, focusing on the growing evidence of the economic resurgence building around the nation’s cities. For the coming year, we’re planning on focusing on what it…
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The new mythology of rich cities and poor suburbs
There’s a new narrative going around about place. Like so many narratives, it’s based on a perceptible grain of truth, but then has a degree of exaggeration that the evidence can’t support. Cities, we are told, are becoming playgrounds of the rich. Last week, Quartz headlined Richard Florida’s recent talk about the future of cities…
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Cities and the price of parking
What the price of parking shows us about urban transportation Yesterday, we rolled out our parking price index, showing the variation in parking prices among large US cities. Gleaning data from ParkMe, a web-based directory of parking lots and rates, we showed how much it cost to park on a monthly basis in different cities.…
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The price of parking
How much does it cost to park a car in different cities around the nation? Today, we’re presenting some new data on a surprisingly under-measured aspect of cities and the cost of living: how much it costs to park a car in different cities. There are regular comparisons of rents and housing costs between cities. The…
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Our birthday wish: Cities for everyone
Two years and two days ago–on October 15th, 2014–we launched City Observatory, a data-driven voice on what makes for successful cities. Since then, we’ve weighed in daily on a whole series of policies issues set in and around urban spaces. So today, we’re taking a few moments to celebrate our birthday, reflect back on the past…
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The Week Observed: October 14, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. More evidence job growth is shifting to city centers. A recent paper by Nathaniel Baum-Snow and Daniel Hartley has some interesting data on the pattern of job growth in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. They find that while suburban area job growth greatly outpaced that of the central…
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Where is ridesharing growing fastest?
There’s a revolution afoot in transportation. Transportation network companies, aka “ridesharing” firms, like Uber and Lyft are disrupting both the markets for urban transportation and labor markets. Their business model–treating drivers as independent contractors, is fueling the so-called “gig economy.” A new report from the Brookings Institution uses federal tax and administrative records to plot…
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The most interesting neighborhood in the world
Where are the most interesting streetscapes and popular destinations in your city? Even among your friends and colleagues, there might be some lively disagreement about that question. But recently, search giant Google weighed in on this question when it overhauled Google Maps this summer. Now it has a new feature, an creamsicle orange shading in…
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More fuzzy math: Vancouver real estate edition
As regular readers of City Observatory already know, the use, misuse and abuse of real estate price indices is one of our pet peeves. We’ve repeatedly excoriated Abodo, Zumper and others for mis-representing median values calculated from their apartment listings, as rental inflation gauges, because they work more like random number generators than measures of…
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More evidence job growth is shifting to the center
One trend we’ve tracked at City Observatory has been the movement of jobs back to city centers. While there are an increasing number of examples of prominent firms moving downtown — GE abandoning its suburban campus for a location in Boston’s Seaport district, McDonalds moving from Oak Brook to a site near Chicago’s Loop —…
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The Week Observed: October 7, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Bubble Logic. A major and persistent change in the housing market from a decade ago has been the decline in the number of “trade-up” home-buyers. While some fret that recent first-time homebuyers have become locked in to so-called starter homes, we point out that in many ways, trade-up…
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Memo to Stockholm
Next Monday, very early, before anyone in North America is out of bed, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will announce the name of the 2016 Nobel Laureate in economic sciences. No doubt the decision has already long since been made by the prize committee. But if they’re still undecided, we have a suggestion. Its…
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Are integrated neighborhoods stable?
Its rare that some obscure terminology from sociology becomes a part of our everyday vernacular, but “tipping point” is one of those terms. Famously, Thomas Schelling used the tipping point metaphor to explain the dynamics of residential segregation in the United States. His thesis was that white residents were willing to live in a mixed…
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A lottery isn’t the answer to our housing problems
Every few months, the national prize pool in the multi-state Powerball lottery piles up to tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Early this year, three lucky winners split a prize with a total value of $1.6 billion dollars. Bucking odds of about one in 262 million, Marvin and Mae Acosta’s purchase of a…
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Bubble logic
We shouldn’t expect the return of the trade-up buyer anytime soon. Is the American homebuyer increasingly stuck in a starter home? That’s the premise of a recent commentary from the Urban Institute “Do we have a generation stuck in starter homes?” Looking at data on the share of home mortgages going to first time home…