Month: November 2016
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Destined to disappoint: housing lotteries
Affordable housing is in short supply in many US cities, perhaps nowhere more chronically than in New York City. Even though New York has more public housing than any other US city, the demand for subsidized units is far greater than supply. As a result, the city regularly conducts lotteries to allocate available units to…
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Does Cyber-Monday mean delivery gridlock Tuesday?
Yesterday was, famously, cyber-Monday, the day in which the nation’s consumers took to their web-browsers and started clicking for holiday shopping in earnest. Tech Crunch reports that estimated e-commerce sales will yesterday were predicted at $3.36 billion, coming on top of almost $5 billion in on-line sales on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. The steady growth…
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Does rent control work? Evidence from Berlin
As housing affordability becomes an increasingly challenging and widespread problem in many US cities, there are growing calls for the imposition of rent control. While there’s broad agreement among economists that rent control is ineffective and even counterproductive, it still seems like a tempting and direct solution to the problem. In Oregon, State House speaker…
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The Week Observed, November 25, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. The rise of global neighborhoods. A new paper published in Demography by Wenquan Zhang and John Logan traces out the changes in the racial and ethnic composition of US neighborhoods over the past three decades. Their chief finding: more and more American’s live in multi-ethnic “global neighborhoods”—places that…
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More evidence on the migration of talent
At City Observatory, we’ve long maintained that the location patterns of talented young workers are an economically important signal. (You can read our report on “The Young and Restless here). Well-educated young adults are the most mobile people in our society, and are flexible, adaptable, and have recent vintage human capital, and generally command lower…
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Your guide to the debate over the Trump Infrastructure Plan
There’s a lot of ink being spilled — or is it pixels rearranged? — over the size, shape, merits and even existence of a Trump Administration infrastructure plan. Infrastructure was one of just a handful of substantive policy talking points in the campaign, and the President-elect reiterated this one on election night. It also appears…
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The growth of global neighborhoods
As the US grows more diverse, so too do its urban neighborhoods. A new paper—“ Global Neighborhoods: Beyond the Multiethnic Metropolis”–published in Demography by Wenquan Zhang and John Logan traces out the changes in the racial and ethnic composition of US neighborhoods over the past three decades. Their chief finding: more and more American’s live…
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The Week Observed, November 18, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Daytime and nighttime segregation. Economic, racial and ethnic segregation are persistent features of the American metropolis. Most studies measure segregation using Census data on place of residence, but that’s at best an incomplete picture of the way different groups interact in urban space. Using data from social media,…
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Supply starting to catch up with demand
Fundamentally, the nation’s housing affordability problems are due to demand outpacing supply: there’s more demand to live in some cities–and especially in great urban neighborhoods–than can be met from the current supply of housing, especially apartments. As demand surges ahead of supply, rents get bid up, which is the most visible manifestation of the affordability…
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Parking: The Price is Wrong
One of the great ironies of urban economies is the wide disparity between the price of parking and the price of housing in cities. Almost everyone acknowledges that we face a growing and severe problem of housing affordability, especially in the more desirable urban neighborhoods of the nation’s largest and most prosperous metropolitna areas. As…
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Daytime and nighttime segregation
In cities, you’ll sometimes hear people talk about a “daytime population”: not how many people live in a place, but how many gather there regularly during their waking hours. So while 1.6 million people may actually live in Manhattan, there are nearly twice that many people on the island during a given workday. Most studies…
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The Week Observed, November 11, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. A tax credit for renters. The Terman Center for Housing Innovation at the UC Berkeley has come up with three fleshed-out and cost-estimated models for providing tax credits for low income renters. The FAIR tax credit would help rectify the strong tilt in the tax system toward home…
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Great neighborhoods don’t have to be illegal—they’re not elsewhere
Ah, Paris! Perhaps one of the world’s most beautiful cities, a capital of European culture, and prosperous economic hub. What’s its secret? Zoning, of course! Just kidding. Actually, Paris went for the better part of a millennium (until 1967) with nothing that an American might recognize as district-based zoning, a prospect that would surely horrify…
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An infographic summarizing neighborhood change
One of City Observatory’s major reports is “Lost in Place,” which chronicles the change in high-poverty neighborhoods since 1970. In it, you’ll find a rich array of data at the neighborhood level showing how and where concentrated poverty grew. We know it’s a complex and wonky set of data, so we’ve worked with our colleagues…
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Cities and Elections
It’s election day, 2016. Here’s some of what we know about cities and voting. Well, at last. Today is election day. While we’re all eagerly awaiting the results of the vote, we thought we’d highlight a few things we know about voting, especially as they relate to cities. Its food for thought as we get…
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A tax credit for renters
A new proposal from Berkeley’s Terner Center aims to broaden favorable tax treatment for housing to include the nation’s renters Our tax code is highly skewed towards homeownership. Between the deductions for mortgage interest expenses and property taxes, the exclusion of capital gains on sales of homes, and the non-taxation of the imputed rent of owner-occupied homes,…
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The Week Observed: November 4, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. The myth of a revealed preference for suburban living. It’s often argued that most Americans must prefer to live in suburbs because so many persons do so. We take a close look at this thesis, and summarize some key research findings from work of Jonathan Levine, which explore…
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Market timing and racial wealth disparities
One of the enduring features of American inequality is the wide disparity in homeownership rates between white Americans and Latinos and African-Americans. And because homeownership has — or at least was, historically — a principal means by which families built wealth, this disparity in homeownership translated into or amplified racial and ethnic wealth disparities. There…
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Affordable Housing: Not just for a favored few
As we all know, 2016 is the year that reality television made its way to the national political stage. Less well noticed is how another idea from reality television has insinuated its way into our thinking about housing policy. From 2006 to 2011, ABC television featured a popular reality television show called “Extreme Makeover: Home…
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Halloween was yesterday: Let’s stop scaremongering about cities
We love scary stories. That’s what Halloween was all about–dressing up as something terrifying, if only for a day. Being scary one day a year can be fun. But constant scaremongering is one way that attitudes and beliefs become detached from facts, in ways that can have truly negative effects. Lately, the presidential campaign has gotten…