Month: January 2017
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Openness to immigration drives economic success
Last Friday, President Trump signed an Executive Order effectively blocking entry to the US for nationals of seven countries—Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. We’ll leave aside the fearful, xenophobic and anti-American aspects of this policy: others have addressed them far more eloquently than we can at City Observatory. And while there’s no…
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What HOT lanes reveal about the value of travel time
Every year, the Texas Transportation Institute, and traffic monitoring firms like Inrix and Tom-Tom trot out scary sounding reports that claim that Americans lose billions or tens of billions of dollars worth of time sitting in traffic. And just as regularly, highway advocates parrot these dire sounding numbers as the justification for spending billions and billions…
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The Week Observed, January 27, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1.How urban geometry creates neighborhood identity. Our colleague Daniel Hertz is back this week with an examination of the way we look at and think about neighborhood identities. He points out that in many urban neighborhoods the amount of land taken up by single family homes creates the impression…
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Constant change and gentrification
A new study of gentrification sheds light on how neighborhoods change. Here are the takeaways: The population of urban neighborhoods is always changing because moving is so common, especially for renters. There’s little evidence that gentrification causes overall rates of moving to increase, either for homeowners or renters. Homeowners don’t seem to be affected at…
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Suburban Renewal: Marietta demolishes affordable housing
Just say the words “urban renewal” and you immediately conjure up images of whole neighborhoods–usually populated by poor families and people of color being dislocated by big new publicly funded development projects. It seems like a relic of the past. But it appears to be getting a new lease on life in the suburbs. For…
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Flood tide–not ebb tide–for young adults in cities
The number of young adults is increasing, not declining, and a larger share of them are living in cities. Yesterday’s New York Times Upshot features a story from Conor Dougherty–”Peak Millennial? Cities Can’t Assume a Continued Boost from the Young.” It questions whether the revival in city living is going to ebb as millennials age,…
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How urban geometry creates neighborhood identity
Does geometry bias our view of how neighborhoods work? Imagine a neighborhood that looks like this: On any given block, there might be a handful of small apartment buildings—three-flats—which are usually clustered near intersections and on major streets. Everything else is modest single-family homes, built on lots the same size as the three-flats. What kind…
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The Week Observed, January 20, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. The long journey toward greater equity in transportation. The observance of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday got us thinking about how far we’ve come–and how far we have yet to go–having a truly equitable society. We reviewed two recent studies that address lingering racial disparities in transportation. The first…
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Louisville’s experiment in transportation economics
As we pointed out yesterday, there’s some initial visual evidence–from peak hour traffic cameras–suggesting that Louisville’s decision to toll its downtown freeway bridges but leave a parallel four-lane bridge un-tolled has produced a significant diversion of traffic away from the freeway. Perhaps without knowing it, Louisville has embarked on an interesting and useful economic experiment. One…
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Has Louisville figured out how to eliminate traffic congestion?
Louisville is in the transportation world spotlight just now. It has formally opened two big new freeway bridges across the Ohio River, and also rebuilt its famous (or infamous) “spaghetti junction” interchange in downtown Louisville. A story at Vox excoriated the decision to rebuild the interchange rather than tear out the riverfront freeway as a…
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Nothing’s worse than funky beer, except funky beer data
You know the feeling: you’re thirsty, you’re primed for a cool, refreshing beverage, and the anticipation has your taste buds tingling. But you pop the cap on the bottle only to find that the beer has turned skunky. It’s very disappointing. Well, we had a small taste of funky beer a couple of week back at…
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Race & transportation: Still a long way to go
January 17 is the day we celebrate the life and dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This year is also the first year that we’re observing a national day of racial healing. We thought we’d take a minute to reflect on two recent studies that provide some strong statistical evidence for the unfortunate persistence of…
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The Week Observed, January 13, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. How diverse are the neighborhoods white people live in? Data from the newly released 5-year American Community Survey tabulations give us an updated picture of the demographics of urban neighborhoods. A new report from the Brookings Insitutiton’s Bill Frey shows that the typical US metropolitan area is continually…
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Who pays the price of inclusionary zoning?
Requiring inclusionary housing seems free, but could mean less money for schools and local services Last month, the Portland City Council voted 5-0 to adopt a sweeping new inclusionary housing requirement for new apartment buildings. The unanimous decision came with the usual round of self-congratulatory comments about how they were doing something to address the…
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Housing supply is catching up to demand
As Noah Smith observed, economists invariably encounter monumental resistance to the proposition that increasing housing supply will do anything meaningful to address the problem of rising rents–especially because new units are so costly. One of the frustrations that we (and increasingly cost-burdened) renters share is the “temporal mismatch” between supply and demand. Demand can change…
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Pulling it all together
At City Observatory, we post several new commentaries each week on a variety of urban themes, and aim to provide discrete, coherent analyses of specific questions, and contributing to the policy dialog about cities. At the start of a new year, we’d like to pull back a bit, and reflect on what we think we’ve…
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How diverse are the neighborhoods white people live in?
Overall, America is becoming more diverse, but in many places the neighborhoods we live in remain quite segregated. The population of the typical US metropolitan area has a much more ethnically and racially mixed composition than it did just a few decades ago. Overall, measured levels of segregation between racial and ethnic groups are declining.…
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The Week Observed, January 6, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. A Toast to 2017: Beer and Cities. Its traditional to begin the New Year with a delicious beverage, and more and more Americans are choosing to celebrate with a locally brewed ale. That’s gotten much easier in the past decade, as microbreweries have flourished around the country. Microbreweries…
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Pollyanna’s ride-sharing breakthrough
A new study says ride-sharing apps cut cut traffic 85 percent. We’re skeptical We’ve developed a calloused disregard for the uncritical techno-optimism that surrounds most media stories about self-driving cars and how fleets of shared-ride vehicles will neatly solve all of our urban transportation problems. But a new story last week re-kindled our annoyance, because…
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Brownstone Brooklyn and the challenges of urban change
In the middle of The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn—a book published in 2011, but no less relevant today—Suleiman Osman turns the tables on the people who have long been the heroes of urbanist lore. Speaking of the insurgent middle-class professionals who, starting in the 1950s and 60s, began to organize to stop to the massive…
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Beer and cities: A toast to 2017
Celebrating the new year, city-style, with a local brew Champagne may be the traditional beverage for ringing in the new year, but we suspect that a locally brewed ale may be the drink of choice for many urbanists today. Much has changed about American beer in the past two decades. Most of the post-prohibition era…
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How not to fix housing affordability
Plans to subsidize renters and homebuyers will likely just fuel housing cost inflation Rising rents and home prices are becoming unbearable–or at least politically unpalatable–in cities around North America. Over the past year, two Pacific Northwest cities, Portland and Vancouver, have seen some of the biggest rent and home price increases anywhere. Portland’s reported double…