Month: March 2017
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The Week Observed, March 31, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. 13 propositions about autonomous vehicles. Despite occasional setbacks–like last week’s crash of an Uber self-driving car in Phoenix–it looks increasingly likely that autonomous vehicles will play an important role in urban transportation in the not-too-distant future. There’s a lot to ponder about what effects they might have on…
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The Cappuccino Congestion Index
April First falls on Saturday, and that’s a good reason to revisit an old favorite, the Cappuccino Congestion Index We’re continuing told that congestion is a grievous threat to urban well-being. It’s annoying to queue up for anything, but traffic congestion has spawned a cottage industry of ginning up reports that transform our annoyance with…
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The High Cost of Segregation
A new report from the Urban Institute shows the stark costs of economic and racial segregation Long-form white paper policy research reports are our stock in trade at City Observatory. We see dozens of them every month, and usually read them with great interest, and flagging the best one’s for the “must read” list we…
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Breaking Bad: Why breaking up big cities would hurt America
New York Times columnist Russ Douthat got a lot of attention a few days ago for his Johnathan Swiftian column–”Break up the liberal city“–suggesting that we could solve the problems of lagging economic growth in rural and small town America by whacking big cities into pieces and spreading their assets more widely. Douthat views himself…
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Autonomous vehicles: Peaking, parking, profits & pricing
13 propositions about autonomous vehicles and urban transportation It looks more and more like autonomous vehicles will be a part of our urban transportation future. There’s a lot of speculation about whether their effects will be for good or ill. While there’s a certain “techno-deterministic” character to these speculations, we’re of the view that the…
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The Week Observed, March 24, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. The US retail industry is getting marked down in a big way, with hundreds of stores operated by well-established chains including Macy’s, J. C. Penney, and the Gap, as well as others, closing or slated for closing in the next few months. By global standards the U.S. is…
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Big city metros are driving the national economy
The nation’s largest city-centered metro areas are powering national economic growth. 2017 will mark a decade since the peak of the last economic cycle (which according to the National Bureau of Economic Research was December 2007. Since then, we’ve experienced the Great Recession (the biggest economic downturn in eight decades), and a long and arduous…
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Transit and home values
Homes with better transit access command higher prices, especially in cities with good transit. Our friends at Redfin, the real estate data and analytics company, have an interesting new report exploring the connection between transit access and home prices. Redfin computes and freely publishes a Transit Score for all of the nation’s houses. Transit Score…
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Getting to critical mass in Detroit
Last month, we took exception to critics of Detroit’s economic rebound who argued that it was a failure because the job and population growth that the city has enjoyed has only reached a few neighborhoods, chiefly those in and around the downtown. A key part of our position was that successful development needs to achieve…
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How much could US retail shrink? And where?
The first quarter of 2017 has marked a parade of announced store closures. The long awaited axe has fallen on 68 more Macy’s stores around the country. J.C. Penney has announced it will close another 138 stores. Other major national retail chains, including The Limited, Gap, Walgreens, Aeropostale and Chico’s, have also announced similarly large closures.…
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The Week Observed, March 17, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Are restaurants dying and taking city economies with them? In a column at Governing, Alan Ehrenhalt raises the alarm that a city economic revival predicated on what he calls “cafe urbanism” is at risk if there’s a collapse in the restaurant sector. Apparently, a number of restaurants in…
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Going faster doesn’t make you happier; you just drive farther
Speed doesn’t seem to be at all correlated to how happy we our with our local transportation systems. Yesterday, we presented some new estimates of the average speed of travel in different metropolitan areas developed by the University of California’s Victor Couture. His data shows that average travel speeds in some metropolitan areas (like Louisville)…
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Speed: Fast cities
Which cities move the fastest? Does it matter? The raison d’etre of the highway engineer is making cars go faster. That’s reflected in chronic complaints about traffic congestion, and codified in often misleading studies, like those produced by the Texas Transportation Institute. The latest contribution to the literature on inter-metropolitan differences in transportation system performance…
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Are restaurants dying, and taking city economies with them?
Alan Ehrenhalt is alarmed. In his tony suburb of Clarendon, Virginia, several nice restaurants have closed. It seems like an ominous trend. Writing at Governing, he’s warning of “The Limits of Cafe’ Urbanism.” Cafe Urbanism is a “lite” version of the consumer city theory propounded by Harvard’s Ed Glaeser, who noted that one of the…
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Affordability beyond the median
For a long time, we’ve been critical of the way we commonly talk about housing affordability. We’ve published a three–part series about why the way we measure housing affordability is all wrong. In particular, we objected to using the 30 percent ratio of housing prices to income as the benchmark of “affordable,” basically because depending on…
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The Week Observed, March 10, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Shrinking offices: What it means for cities. Its not just you’re imagination: offices are becoming less common and smaller, and a variety of space-sharing and space-saving practices are taking hold in businesses around the nation. The number of square feet of office space leased per new office employee…
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Twilight of the NIMBYs? LA’s Measure S Fails
La-La Land voters deal a crushing defeat to a “NIMBYism on steroids” The latest returns show Los Angeles’ Measure S–the self-styled “Neighborhood Integrity Initiative”–failing by a 31 percent “Yes” to 69 percent “No” margin. If it had passed, Measure S was predicted to bring new housing development in Los Angeles to a screeching halt for the…
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What we know about rent control
Today, partly as a public service, we’re going to dig into the academic literature on an arcane policy topic: rent control. We also have a parochial interest in the subject: the Oregon Legislature is considering legislation that would lift the state’s ban on cities imposing rent control. The legislation is being proposed by Oregon House…
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The implications of shrinking offices
The amount of office space allotted to each worker is shrinking. What does that mean for cities? Last week a new report from real estate analytics firm REIS caught our eye. Called “The Shrinking Office Footprint” this white paper looks at changes in the demand for office space over the last couple of business cycles.…
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The Week Observed, March 3, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. More flawed congestion rankings. Traffic analysis firm Inrix released yet another report purporting to estimate the dollar cost of congestion and ranking the world’s cities from most to least traffic burdened. Our review shows that the report suffers from many of the same problems that plagued its predecessors. Chief…
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What Travis Kalanick’s meltdown tells us about Uber
As has been well chronicled in the media, it’s been a tough month for Uber. The company’s CEO, Travis Kalanick was vilified in the press for the company’s tolerance for sexual harassment of its female employees, and derided for his participation in President Trump’s business advisory council (from which he resigned after an estimated 200,000…
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The real welfare Cadillacs have 18 wheels
Truck freight movement gets a subsidy of between $57 and $128 billion annually in the form of uncompensated social costs, over and above what trucks pay in taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If trucking companies paid the full costs associated with moving truck freight, we’d have less road damage and congestion, fewer crashes,…