What City Observatory did this week 1. The latest from the Louisville travel behavior experiment. Just before the New Year, Louisville started charging tolls to cross its newly-widened I-65 bridge. When it did, traffic across the bridge fell by almost half. Part of the reason was that motorists could take a very short detour and […]
The Week Observed, April 28, 2017 Read More »
Cities are organisms, not machines; So a smart city has to learn and not be engineered The growing appreciation of the importance of cities, especially by leaders in business and science, is much appreciated and long overdue. Many have embraced the Smart City banner. But it seems each observer defines “city” in the image of
What does it mean to be a “Smart City?” Read More »
It’s no longer fashionable to get an unrealistically flattering portrait painted, but you can get an economist to do it with numbers. You’ve no doubt heard the term “hagiography” an unduly flattering biography or other written treatment designed to burnish the public image of some person. The term is derived from the Greek words for
Hagiometry: Fawning flatterers with an economic model Read More »
Inclusionary zoning programs are too small to make a dent in housing affordability Two of the most respected names in housing research are Lance Freeman and Jenny Schuetz. Freeman is professor urban planning at Columbia University and author of a series of papers examining neighborhood change, and considering whether and when gentrification leads to the
The 0.1 percent solution: Inclusionary zoning’s fatal scale problem Read More »
Even with the free alternative closed, traffic is very light on the new I-65 bridges Time for one of our periodic check-ins on our real world transportation pricing experiment in Louisville, Kentucky. As you recall, we’ve been watching Louisville closely, because just at the end of last year, the city started what amounts to a
The latest from the Louisville traffic experiment Read More »
What City Observatory did this week 1. How we measure segregation depends on why we care. Daniel Hertz explores the various ways we measure the geographic separation of different racial and ethnic groups. There’s a widely used dissimilarity index, that looks at differences between two groups, like blacks and whites. There are broader measures that
The Week Observed, April 21, 2017 Read More »
Four decades after the city earned national recognition for tearing out a downtown freeway, it gets ready to build more April 22 is Earth Day, and to celebrate, Oregon’s Legislature is on the verge of considering a transportation package that would drop more than a billion dollars into three Portland area freeway widening projects. Back
Happy Earth Day, Oregon! Let’s Widen Some Freeways! Read More »
Why is affordable housing so expensive? In many cities, affordable housing has a problem: it’s not affordable. California Governor Jerry Brown made that point again, emphatically, with his new state budget. He’s said that he’s not putting any new state resources into subsidizing affordable housing until state and local governments figure out ways to bring
The high, high price of affordable housing Read More »
Your 1,200 word bluffer’s guide to Richard Florida’s new book Richard Florida’s new book “The New Urban Crisis: How our cities are increasing inequality, deepening segregation, and failing the middle class–and what we can do about it,” came out last week. The book touches on many of the issues that are near and dear to
The New Urban Crisis: Cliff Notes version Read More »
Segregation is complicated and multi-dimensional, and measuring it isn’t easy In 2014, NYU’s Furman Center hosted a roundtable of essays on “The Problem of Integration.” Northwestern sociologist Mary Pattillo kicked it off: I must begin by stating that I am by no means against integration…. My comments are not to promote racial separatism, nor to argue
How we measure segregation depends on why we care Read More »
