Month: December 2016
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The Week Observed, December 30, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. The illegal city of Somerville. Just outside of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Somerville is one of the most sought after suburbs in the Boston area. It has a combination of attractive neighborhoods and dense housing, nearly all of it the legacy of the city’s 19th and early 20th century roots.…
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Our ten most popular posts of 2016
As 2016 draws to a close, we look back at our most popular commentaries of the year. Hear they are, in reverse order: #10. Introducing the sprawl tax #9. Urban myth busting: New rental housing and median income households #8. What filtering can and can’t do. #7. What I learned playing Sim City #6. In…
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For whom the bridge tolls
A crazy toll structure that encourages more driving. Kentucky and Indiana have just put the finishing touches on two new bridges crossing the Ohio River. Built at a cost of about $2.6 billion, the bridge project also includes a rebuilding “Spaghetti Junction” an elaborate system of on- and off-ramps in Louisville, where I-65 and I-64…
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Reducing congestion: Katy didn’t
Here’s a highway success story, as told by the folks who build highways. Several years ago, the Katy Freeway in Houston was a major traffic bottleneck. It was so bad that in 2004 the American Highway Users Alliance (AHUA) called one of its interchanges the second worst bottleneck in the nation wasting 25 million hours…
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The illegal city of Somerville
Zoning is complicated. It’s complicated on its own, with even small towns having dozens of pages of regulations and acronyms and often-inscrutable diagrams; and it’s complicated as a policy issue, with economists and lawyers and researchers bandying about regression lines and all sorts of claims about the micro and macro effects of growth rates and…
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The Week Observed, December 23, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. A rebound in millennial car-buying?. Stories purporting to debunk the tendency of younger adults to move to cities, buy fewer houses and drive less seem to have great appeal to editors everywhere. We look into recent reports claiming that ride-sharing millennials crave car ownership after all. A recent…
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Denver backs away from inclusionary zoning
At the top of most housing activist wish-lists is the idea that cities should adopt inclusionary housing requirements: when developers build new housing, they ought to be required to set-aside some portion of the units–say 10 or 20 percent–for low or moderate income families. Dozens of cities around the country have adopted some variant of…
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Some timely technologies to help pedestrians deal with self-driving cars
City Observatory has its own modest proposals for making “Smart City” streets safer. Sooner than many of us thought possible, self-driving cars are in testing on city streets around the country. While a central promise of autonomous vehicle backers has been that this technological advance would eliminate road carnage, there’ve been good reasons to be…
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A rebound in millennial car-buying?
Except for boomers, we’re all less likely to be buying new cars today One of the favorite “we’re-going-to-debunk-the-claims-about-millenials-being-different” story ideas that editors and reporters seem to love is pointing out that millennials are actually buying cars. Forget what you’ve heard about bike-riding, bus-loving, Uber-using twenty-somethings, we’re told, this younger generation loves its cars, even if…
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The Week Observed, December 16, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Urban transportation’s camel problem. Naive optimism is the order of the day in speculating about the future of urban transportation. In theory, some combination of autonomous vehicles, fully instrumented city streets, and transportation network companies will help us solve all of our problems, from congestion to traffic fatalities…
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More evidence for peer effects: Help with homework edition
There’s a large a growing body of research that shows the importance of peer effects on lifetime economic success of kids. For example, while the education level your parents is a strong determinant of your level of education, it turns out that the education level of your neighbors is nearly half as strong. Much of…
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You are where you eat.
The Big Idea: Many metro areas vie for the title of “best food city.” But what cities have the most options for grabbing a bite to eat — and what does that say about where you live? There are plenty of competing rankings for best food cities floating around the internet. You can find lists…
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Copenhagen: More than bike lanes
This month, traffic counters in Copenhagen pointed to an important milestone. According to their data, for the first time, the number of trips taken by bicycle in the city surpassed the number of trips taken by car. The Guardian reports–“Two-wheel takeover: bikes outnumber cars for the first time in Copenhagen.”–that the number of bike trips…
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Urban Transportation’s Camel Problem
There’s a lot of glib talk about how technology–ranging from ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, to instrumented Smart Cities and, ultimately, autonomous vehicles–will fundamentally reshape urban transportation. We’re told, for example, that autonomous vehicles will eliminate traffic fatalities, obviate the need for parking lots, and solve transit’s “last mile” problem. But there are good…
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The Week Observed, December 9, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Pollution and poor neighborhoods. Environmental justice advocates point out–quite correctly–that poor neighborhoods tend to suffer much higher levels of pollution than the typical neighborhood. While this is often due to the callous indifference of public officials to the plight of the poor and people of color (as well as…
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Some thoughts on Portland’s proposed inclusionary housing plan
Why Portland’s proposed inclusionary zoning plan will likely make housing less affordable As we reported in September, Portland Oregon is moving ahead with plans to enact an inclusionary housing requirement. Briefly, the proposal would require all newly constructed apartment buildings with 20 or more units to set aside 20 percent of units for housing affordable…
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A policy that works: Raising the minimum wage
Higher minimum wages result in greater earnings for low wage workers, and no loss of jobs We’re always casting about for effective policies to address poverty. And there’s new evidence that higher minimum wages accomplish just that. In a new review of the literature and data by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers shows that…
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Are the ‘burbs really back?
Last Friday’s Wall Street Journal came out with another eye-catching headline story in the city versus suburbs battle of the bands: “Suburbs outstrip cities in population growth, study finds. Big cities may be getting all the attention, but the suburbs are holding their own in the battle for population and young earners. . . .…
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Pollution and poor neighborhoods: A blast from the past
It’s been widely noted that poor neighborhoods tend to bear a disportioncate share of the exposure to environmental disamenities of all kinds. In the highway building era of the 1950s and 1960s, states and cities found it cheaper and politically easier to route new roads through poor neighborhoods, not only dislocating the local populace, but…
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The Week Observed, December 2, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Does Rent Control Work: Evidence from Berlin. Economists are nearly unanimous about rent control: they think it doesn’t work. Berlin’s recent adoption of a new rent control scheme in 2015 provides a new test case to see if they’re right. An early analysis of the Berlin program shows that…
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Why biotech strategies are often 21st century snake oil
Thanks to technological innovations, our lives are in many ways better, faster, and safer: We have better communications, faster, cheaper computing, and more sophisticated drugs and medical technology than ever before. And rightly, the debates about economic development focus on how we fuel the process of innovation. At City Observatory, we think this matters to…