Month: June 2017
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Pity the poor Super Commuter
About 2 percent of all car commuters travel 90 minutes to work, same as a decade ago. We’ve always been clear about our views on mega commuters, those traveling an hour and a half or more to work daily. As we said last year, mega commuting is a non-big, non-growing non-problem. But the loneliness of…
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Prices Matter: Parking and Ride Hailing
Pricing parking drives demand for ride hailing services Ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft have been highly reluctant to share data about their services with cities. In California, the state Public Utilities Commission has pre-empted municipal access to ride-hail data (and isn’t sharing it with anyone). As Bruce Schaller’s recent study of New York (one…
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Urban myth busting: Congestion, idling, and carbon emissions
Increasing road capacity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will backfire Time for another episode of City Observatory’s Urban Myth Busters, which itself is an homage to the long-running Discovery Channel series “Mythbusters” that featured co-hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman using something called “science” to test whether commonly believed tropes were really true. In each episode, they would…
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The Week Observed, June 23, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Downzoning won’t make housing cheaper. Chuck Marohn of StrongTowns notes that land that’s zoned for apartments generally commands higher prices than nearby land zoned for single family homes. Couldn’t we lower the cost of housing, he asks, by downzoning that multi-family land? The short answer is no: Low…
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The Week Observed, June 30, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Urban Myth Busting: Idling in traffic and carbon pollution. There’s a frequently repeated, just-so story about carbon emissions: if we didn’t spend so much time stuck in stop-and-go traffic and idling, we’d emit less pollution. Highway advocates seize on this idea as an excuse to build more capacity:…
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You can’t judge housing affordability without knowing transportation costs
The “commonly accepted” 30 percent standard for judging housing affordability leaves out transportation and location At City Observatory, we’ve long been dissatisfied with commonly used measures of describing housing affordability. There are lots of reasons to believe that a single, fixed percentage of income standard does a poor job of reflecting whether housing is priced…
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Rent inflation is abating
Over the past year, rent inflation has declined in 48 of the top 50 markets For the past several years, rising rents have been at the center of the nation’s housing affordability debate. A combination of former homeowners dispossessed by the collapse of the housing bubble, weak incomes and job prospects for younger workers and…
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More evidence of the growth of concentrated poverty
Since 2000, the number of people living in extremely poor neighborhoods has doubled; neighborhoods of concentrated poverty are still disproportionately in the densest urban places. Last week, the Joint Center on Housing Studies released its annual “State of the Nation’s Housing” report. While most of the report focuses on new housing construction, and the slow…
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Downzoning won’t make housing cheaper
The fallacy of composition leads people to get the connection between density and affordability backwards Our good friend at Strong Towns, Chuck Marohn is utterly right about a great many things. But he’s committed a classic Kotkinesque blunder when it comes to evaluating the connection between density and home prices. His theory is that higher…
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The Week Observed, June 16, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cultural appropriation: Theft or smorgasbord? A recent Internet furor erupted over a Portland burrito stand that copied its recipe from that of street vendors in Mexico. An essential feature of cities and economic development, as Jane Jacobs noted, is that they’re constantly remixing ideas. When is borrowing and…
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Pricing roads for autonomous vehicles
Portland and other cities are considering future policies for a world of autonomous vehicles: We have some advice: Use this opportunity to dynamically price roads. Like many cities, Portland is considering what policies it should adopt to accomodate autonomous vehicles. Mayor Ted Wheeler has expressed his support for opening the city to self-driving cars and…
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Historic Preservation: NIMBYism for the Rich?
Is historic preservation just thinly veiled NIMBYism? There’s a growing recognition that local land use controls that preclude increased density in cities are helping contribute to the shortage of affordable housing. President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers lent considerable credence to that view, and the YIMBY movement is growing. Unsophisticated and bald-faced efforts to block…
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Cultural appropriation: Theft or Smorgasbord?
If it weren’t for cultural appropriation, would America have any culture at all? In Portland, two women opened a food cart business–Kook’s Burritos–selling burritos based on ones that they’d seen and tasted during a trip to Puerto Novo, Mexico. They were frank, telling reporters that they’d hung out watching local vendors prepare tortillas, to see if…
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The Week Observed, June 9, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. How green was my city? The Trump administration’s announcement that it would pull the US out of the Paris Climate Accords was greeted with dismay by many environmentalists, but governors and mayors around the nation stepped up to say they’d continue to fight climate change. Climate hawks are…
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More evidence on ridesharing’s growth surge
New data shows the diffusion of ride-sharing among US metro areas: Parking prices matter. We know from casual observation and the occasional leaded corporate document that ridesharing (which is more accurately but clumsily labeled ‘transportation network companies’) is growing rapidly. Although Uber and Lyft are pretty stingy with their data, our friends at the Brookings…
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Portland’s Green Dividend
When you build a city that enables people to drive less, they spend less on cars and gas and have more to spend on other things. Here is my 2007 report, published by CEOs for Cities, which describes Portland’s Green Dividend–the additional income that Portland area residents have to spend because they drive fewer miles…
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How green was my City (Hall)
In the wake of Pres. Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, many mayors and governors have stepped up their rhetoric on climate change. Will their actions match their words? On June 1, President Trump announced that he would withdraw the United States from the international climate accords agreed to in Paris in 2015. The…
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The Week Observed, June 2, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities and the returns to education. We know that the nation’s best educated people are increasingly concentrated in urban areas. Data compiled by the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service shows a big reason why: the more education you have the bigger the urban wage premium. College-educated…
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Integration and social interaction: Evidence from Intermarriage
Reducing segregation does seem to result in much more social interaction, as intermarriage patterns demonstrate Yesterday, we took a close and critical look at Derek Hyra’s claim that mixed-income, mixed-race communities fell short of improving the lot of the disadvantaged because of the persistence of what he called “micro-segregation.” Even though they might live in…