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 […]
The Week Observed, March 31, 2017 Read More »
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
The Cappuccino Congestion Index Read More »
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
The High Cost of Segregation Read More »
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
Breaking Bad: Why breaking up big cities would hurt America Read More »
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
Autonomous vehicles: Peaking, parking, profits & pricing Read More »
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
The Week Observed, March 24, 2017 Read More »
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
Big city metros are driving the national economy Read More »
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
Transit and home values Read More »
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
Getting to critical mass in Detroit Read More »
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.
How much could US retail shrink? And where? Read More »
